 It's five past 12, welcome to our new webinar today. I will give the floor directly to our director, Alexis Gostil. Thank you very much, Alexis, the floor is yours. Good morning, everybody. Can you hear me? Yes? So I'm very, very happy to have to introduce this webinar because that's a very important topic for us. Actually, seven years ago, when I've been elected to become the director of the EMC-DDA, part of my program was to propose not only to describe the past situation or to improve, to describe prison drug situation, but also, and especially today in six months time, the EMC-DDA regulation will be 30 years old. So I found that after 25 or 26 years of monitoring the drug situation in Europe, we should also develop a capacity to think about what could happen in the future and what are the things that we may have to do to prevent or to cope with this. And I must say that I am extremely happy and thankful because the EMC-DDA staff that has been involved in that project and that ID, which is Claudia Parchak, Maria Moreira, but also Paul Griffith, they have transformed what was an ID, an intention of mine into something extremely great, extremely scientifically sound, and that has become now a toolkit that we are launching today and that opens new ways in which the EMC-DDA in the future could make its work and the work of the rate of national focal point even more useful for decision makers at European or at national level. So first of all, once more, thank you very much because I think you did and you do a fantastic work in that area to the point that we took some leadership and we have been inviting other EU agencies that are members of the network of chief scientists of European agencies to start and to continue to develop a reflection on this. Today, we have some very close friends and good partners and colleagues. The first who is going to speak, I think is Massage and Massage is working in a place that I think all the European or Brussels bubble, almost nobody knows, even if it is a very important institution, it's the joint research center of the European Commission. And what people know even less is that in this joint research center, there is a special service about foresight or future. There are Massage among all the things he's going to explain what this foresight, so I will not comment, but certainly I'm sure nobody imagine how strong we are in Europe in terms of capacity methodology and Massage certainly will give you some hints about what the commission and what all together we can do in that area. And it has been very supportive for EMCTDA and all agencies working in that area. Team roads, I think for those who follow drug policy and anything related to drugs, I think many people know team roads for many, many years. I'm very happy to have him together with us and for the presentation he's going to make and share with us today. Then we have three colleagues, three persons who have been extremely helpful, supportive and actually that also helped the EMCTDA team to discover and then to build strong competence in this area. The first of course is Cornelia Daheim from Future Impact who has been working with us and is still working with us. And Cornelia, I think everybody in the center who was involved in that work is extremely thankful for that partnership and the things, the pleasure to work with you but also what they've learned. And then we have Brian Galvin who's the head of the Irish Vocal Point who will speak about how this can be applied in the Member State, in this case Ireland. And there is also a presentation from Liz Grimo who's the head of the Belgian Vocal Point on the project that is grouping a few countries and national focal points about how this methodology could continue to be used also at national level. So I think you will get a perfect overview. And I think it comes this seminar and the toolkit that we are launching today they come at a very, very important moment. As I said, in the first years of the MCDDA already long time ago, when there were criticism there were not so many, but some criticism were saying, okay, you are quite good at describing the drug situation as it was four or five years ago, but okay, what about today? Today, especially thanks to complementary tools for data collection and for the robust European drug information system. We have the long-term trends, the routine data collection. We have also complementary sources of information like wastewater, EuroDen, web surveys, escape project with the residue analysis of the residues of syringes, plenty of other things. And this is actually helps us to understand much better what's happening now, almost in real time when we speak about the early warning system. And now with this new capacity that we are still developing, acquiring, learning and trying to adapt to our needs and further develop. I think we really really are at the moment where we can work, we have to work with the member state and provide them additional support to understand from these recent trends in the European Union that we presented last week, which we can summarize with everywhere, drugs are everywhere, everything, everything can be used as a drug, no more distinction between lacyd, illicit, vegetal origin, chemical origin, hard drugs, soft drugs. And everyone can be impacted by the huge availability and the changes on the drug market. So at this time, it makes it even more important to build, develop together a capacity, making use of data because that's one of the key strengths of EMCDDA, Android Docs Network. But to make this, to put this at the service of reflection scenarios, trying to understand what may come in the future and if this was happening, can we prevent it or how could or should we react? And it's important because we celebrate almost 30 years of European drug policy and we need to be now ready to learn the lessons from that experience, to prepare ourselves for the future challenges. And at the same time, we have increasingly a wide number, a wide range of experts who have been influencing or at the origin of very important changes in national or European drug policies over the last 30 years. Some of them already went on retirement, some others will follow. And we definitely need to prepare the next generation to be ready for the next challenge and learning also not only from some of the key achievements but from some of the mistakes. And therefore, this foresight, this futures exercise is even more important than we imagined seven or eight years ago when we started trying to understand what does it mean exactly. So thank you very much. And I really look forward to listen to all the speakers in this webinar. Thank you. Thank you to you Alexis, the chairpersons for this webinar today with the Claudia Palciac and Maria Moreira. I switch off my camera. I just recommend the participants to write their questions on the questions and answer functionality. The number of participants is going up. So thank you very much. Claudia, the floor is yours. Thank you, Marika. I wanted to say good morning, but I see people from all over the world. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Again, my name is Claudia Palciac. I'm together with my colleague Maria Moreira. We both work in the Scientific Coordination Unit of the EMCVD. We will be co-chairing this webinar. The objectives of the webinar are threefold. First of all, as mentioned by Alexis, we are launching today the EMCVD foresight toolkit for the drugs area. But also with this webinar, we want to promote the foresight approach and we want to increase your knowledge and understanding of what foresight is. And finally, we want to take a stock of foresight activities within the drugs field and reflect on some possible ways forward. The agenda of today is really busy and exciting. We have a lot of distinguished panelists, so I don't want to take too much time in the introduction. I would move directly to our first speaker, Maciej Krzysztofowicz, policy analyst in the competence center on foresight, which is hosted by the European Commission Joint Research Center that Alexis mentioned about. Probably we are increasing the knowledge of this institution as well today. Maciej works with Horizon Scanning, Megatrends and foresight studies, and he will give you, I would say, a crash course on what foresight is. So Maciej, the floor, and I would say a challenge is yours. Thank you very much. Let me write some things on the side a bit. I hope that doesn't cover the screen too much. Okay. No, yes, that works now, yeah, fine. Okay, so that's, I'm afraid, the best I can do because I have some screen problems, but thank you very much for the invitation and the opportunity to talk a bit about foresight and especially foresight in the European Union in the Commission to give it a slightly broader angle. So your activities are very interesting and important, especially that they fall within a kind of a wider community and a wider activity of issues, which is very exciting. So as was already mentioned, I'm part of the competence center on foresight that is hosted within the joint research center of the Commission. And basically our role is to support the European Commission, but European Union in general and all the stakeholders in building anticipatory capacity through foresight methods. So it is to actually embed thinking, structured thinking about the future into the working of the Commission, into the policies, into the thinking about what you could be. So there is an increasing interest from the policy area in foresight. And especially now in the Commission with the specific role of the Commissioner Seftavich on foresight, there's also a kind of reorganization. More and more people want to deal with foresight, want to work with foresight. I regularly get a question or a comment of people saying, well, I'm starting to work on foresight, maybe I should get a crystal ball. And I tell them immediately, you should not get one crystal ball, you should actually get five to 10 crystal balls because you don't want to be limited to one future. You want to see at least 10, at least 15 alternative futures. But to be more specific, so foresight, we want to actually have a structured approach or looking into a medium and long-term future. And you could say, and people do say, well, we've always been doing that. So what the approach, the foresight approach actually gives you, but first of all, it gives you more structure in this kind of thinking. It gives you the tools that let you think about it more in a more organized way. It lets you use your tools to actually make it more inclusive, to think about it not individually, not with only with a small group, but in a wider setting with more stakeholders, just bringing that kind of collective intelligence into work. And finally, what it does is actually, with the more structured courses and the more inclusive process, it actually gives you more diverse understanding of the future. And if we imagine that as we've seen with the recent examples, the Ukraine war of COVID, even the wildest or less expected futures could become easily our reality, our understanding and our actually capacity to imagine more is crucial in thinking about the future of policies. So going back to the policy aspect of it, so people often assume in the policy cycle, it falls under assessing impacts of policy, what impacts it will have in the future. But this clearly is the kind of intuitive approach, but we think at all stages of the EU policy cycle or generally policy cycle or the policy cycle or how we understand it in the European Commission also, force that could be useful, especially at an early stage when we anticipate the developed strategies when we are framing the issues that we want to deal with, framing them in a forward-looking way rather than as problems from the past, actually lets us imagine the matter and work better with those issues. On the other hand, negotiating, sort of inter-institutionally, negotiating internationally, also works differently if you have actually a broader way of looking at things. If you have already been developing foresight, which was inclusive where you have worked through assumptions, you have worked with different scenarios with people, the common basis and common understanding of different issues is different if you are just limited to conflicting final options. So we're trying to encourage foresight at all these dimensions of the policy cycle, but what do we then do in practice? So just to get you very quickly up to speed we have a very schematic way of working with foresight. We start with horizon scanning or looking at the emerging and new signals of change, which is complemented by mega-trend analysis. So looking at those large-scale developments that are more persistent over time that we know will be happening over the next, say, 10, 20 years to actually formulate a story of the future. But this story of the future is pretty linear and it is more of an extrapolation of the current situation. But we also start thinking, well, where are the uncertainties? What could actually change and go in different directions? And from that, we derive scenarios. So we actually think, well, this could be going this way or that way and this could be going this and that way. And actually we have two or four or five or 15 plausible futures that we actually want to imagine. But imagining a future is not the same as actually imagining yourself in the future. So then we work with visioning exercises to actually position yourself in the future and it doesn't have to be in a particular scenario. Scenarios just set the landscape, but actually thinking what are the elements, what are the processes, but what are the characteristics of your organization or a particular issue in the future? And with backcasting, you can actually come back and guide the direction. So we have already started with the president looking around and we have gone to the future with scenarios and visioning. And but the equally important part of foresight that we work on is actually coming back to reality now and acting on this additional knowledge, this is additional insights. And so working with other people who have not been also a part of process through policy gaming, again, creating serious games for interactions in these future situations or maybe through speculative design, actually create future products or future possibilities and discuss it with people already. So all these elements for us are part of the foresight. So of course the toolkit deals with that first element and it's a necessary starting step to think about the future. And to start from today in the commission we have worked with different stakeholders and different ways on emerging issues and the horizon scanning. Here is a graphic example from the exercise we are doing for emerging environmental issues where you take this final approach and start looking very broadly to then see which are the most interesting elements that are emerging that are new that could actually become quite important. And the other dimension of that looking at the trend analysis are the mega trends. So we have developed in the competence center a set of 14 mega trends which we use and we help policy makers use to actually test and reframe their policy issues, how they could look like when they are, when they will be confronted by or shaped by those mega trends in the next 10, 15 or 20 years. So that's the situation of looking around and extrapolating. And of course the scenarios is what comes next and they combine both the elements that change but also what stays the same in all the different pictures so that you can actually imagine a landscape of potential futures of potential developments. Not only the fore, the fore actually give you the breadth of the futures. And what we also very often people comment is that, well, I have my preferred scenario and then we say, well, would you really like this particular scenario or the elements from different scenarios which you like or don't like? And that's maybe often for us a better approach to see across the scenarios rather than focus on one or the other. And of course, once you look across the scenarios you start to formulate a vision where in across those futures, where would I want to be or my organization where it doesn't want to be or my issue where it could be. And that brings us to a kind of more developed views of not only how the future could unfold but also where we want to be in the future. And the last element again in our processes I've mentioned maybe the easiest and the most easy way to actually get people back to thinking sort of actionable terms from all these imaginations of the future is through back casting. So looking back what steps need to be taken and what different events have to or may happen to actually arrive at the point that we want to be in the vision. But we also engage people and many stakeholders in exercises through serious games. So we have this scenario exploration system which you see on the bottom left here which is a serious game which with about seven or eight stakeholders who actually role play a particular scenario and imagine what would it mean for them, for their competitors, for other stakeholders and work together to their goals in the longer term future. But we also work with speculative design, so examples of products of the future to get people imagine what is the environment in which these products find themselves. What is that future that this particular artifact is part of? We also work with future personas so we can imagine the people and their lives in the future and with all the different methods that actually help us go back from the future to thinking about what does it mean for me. So broadly this is a general description of the issues and the toolbox and I'm sure this will be mentioned more often is the first stepping stone into many of these other elements and it's a good one and it also mentions the fact that you can actually from looking at the current situation looking at the trends both emerging and more established trends you can start imagining the different futures and the scenarios and go further with this which I would also encourage you but if you don't have that first good step then the rest is much more difficult. So final just to mention I've already said that there is a process, a movement set in the commission of building strategic foresight and building anticipatory capacity and all the activities that we are discussing fall into that exercise as well because the purpose of this is to first of all bring the foresight community in the European Union together to actually get people benefit from make them benefit from the variety of methods and understand the variety of methods and approaches there are very much like the process that is led by the AMC DBA on the, with the agencies but also to actually think together about the future. So contribute to common thinking about the future because in a way the future of drug use or the future of drugs is not only the future of specific technologies but you have to imagine the whole lifestyles and lifestyles are also linked to the future of mobility the future of education the future of all these other aspects. So actually every exercise we're doing at some granular level actually builds up our broader understanding of the changes that we could be seeing in Europe and the potentials for the different futures in Europe and the part of the strategic foresight is actually to bring all that future knowledge together and actually open up this understanding and this imagination a bit further. And finally, so the exercise is to build anticipatory capacity in the institutions but also with member states, with other institutions and especially with stakeholders so that we can actually get a lot of new insights because the diversity of views and the broad and the differences in both in understanding and in thinking about the future actually make us much richer in imagining richer futures. So with that, I think I would want to finish if you want to have more information there are links here to some of the documents that the commission has prepared on foresight and I think that could be a broad introduction into sort of a wider thinking of the trend analysis in a more sort of thinking about the diverse futures. Thank you. Thank you, thank you much very much. I'm sure there are already questions but I want to say as well that we will probably take all the presentation first and we'll keep questions and answers sessions at the end of the meeting. So thank you so much. We will share the slides as well so everyone can explore more the tools and methods that are developed by your institution. So now let me move to our second speaker, Tim Rose who is a professor of sociology of public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. His background is in qualitative research methods in the field of drugs, health and epidemics and he's currently doing work on the use of mathematic modeling as an evidence in policy. So in his presentation, he will be talking about the importance of future oriented approaches and he will be elaborating on some of the major drivers of change impacting the drugs area. So Tim, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. Can somebody nod just to make sure I can be heard? Of course. Fantastic. So I think my role here in a few minutes is to move us from the general as we've heard about foresight and its role in the commission more generally to move us a little bit closer to the drugs and the drugs policy field and then we're gonna obviously move onwards to the toolkit specifically. So I'm gonna be reiterating in some of the ways the importance of thinking ahead. As Claudia says, I've done some work with the MCDDA to help map some of this thinking and some of the mega trends we might be thinking of in relation to signals in terms of what might become in terms of drugs and drugs policy. The point we've just heard is about thinking ahead is about an anticipatory capacity which helps us respond better arguably and be more prepared. I think if I'm gonna make one point in the presentation, it's that this work alters the present. It impacts in the now. So thinking about anticipating what might become alters the present and how we act in the now. So I see this kind of form of anticipatory governance in a way as an intervention in itself kind of in the now. So full site is an intervention in and of itself, I think. So, oh, I can't move my slides. There we go. So this is what I want to cover. I want to kind of reiterate some of the points about we need to think beyond the now and the near present as well as beyond the local and the proximal to further away. And part of the role in doing that is a shift in thinking actually to becoming more speculative. At the same time and move from the local to the bigger picture, I think helps us become more ecological. It helps us situate the local and the proximal in the bigger picture. And this is why megatrends are important. So obviously it's a complex challenge responding to a fast changing and agile world in relation to drugs and drug markets and so on. But part of that challenge and part of that complexity is because these things drugs and drugs policy and drugs intervention entangle with all sorts of other things social, technological, environmental, political, and so on. So this is why thinking spectratively and further forwards is also about thinking ecologically. Two ways to do that devices if you like or ways to think with in terms of doing speculative and foresight thinking are to think about big events things of which are beyond the local but nonetheless affect the local and megatrends which we've heard about and we'll hear more about in the next few minutes. So the current focus of much drugs monitoring and drugs policy work in fact, as we heard at the very outset tends to be quite near and local. Even epidemiology which talks about risk factors as a means of thinking forwards tends to do that on knowledge which is observable kind of in the present if you like or at least in the recent present. So risk factors might help predict they might help give us a sense of the likelihood of things or how probable things might be but they do that on the basis of a fairly localized knowledge and a fairly proximal knowledge which is close to the now. So what I think we're having to do today is move from that more proximal thinking which tends to have a predictive flavor to it more about probabilities what we think might happen to jumping further forwards and further into the future further away from the now to think more spectatively. So this is a question which is less about what is probable what we think may happen. It's more of a question about what could happen? What is possible? So we're moving from probabilities to possibilities what might happen to what could happen what the likely future is to also what kind of possible alternative futures do we want to make? And from the local as I said to the bigger more ecological picture. So that's our challenge and it's been said and by others in the drugs field and here is a small quotation for instance from a drug policy researcher called John Hawkins that we've had relatively speaking and inattention to the future. We've become much better at monitoring in the now as we've heard we have wastewater analysis we have wonderful kind of technologies for doing better detection to help us do earlier warning. And now we're talking not just about detection we're moving towards projection and these are kind of different ways of thinking and doing our research. So John Hawkins says that researchers tend to write only about what they can be sure of and this is why they lean towards the now what is observable what they can see before them or recently and consequently they say little about the future which is obviously much more uncertain and much more unknown. So foresight is also different methodologically speaking in terms of how we're used to working I think it takes us into the realm of engaging with uncertainty with engaging with things which are less known it's a different kind of evidencing. Now foresight is one way and I'm very new to foresight like many of you might hear also be new to foresight but I've done some work around futuring and in relation to modeling and simulation and other things. So some of my language in this presentation might be slightly different to that of foresight but I think it nonetheless integrates. Now foresight for me and I think this was clear just a minute ago it's not simply about prediction it does necessarily involve the speculation and the kind of horizon scanning and the mapping of signals and weak signals and trends as to what might be going on out there is about the production of alternative futures for us to think with in terms of how to respond well. That is not prediction that is not knowing or thinking that we know what might happen this is putting alternatives before us and this is why I think foresight is an intervention in the now because by deliberating on alternatives the process of thinking through, discussing talking through what we think could happen and what might be possible is also a question of what we want to happen and what kind of futures we want to shape. So foresight is an intervention in the now the process of doing this is a deliberative exercise and I think that's why it's quite powerful for me it's not merely about imagination it's not merely about guessing it's actually acting and thinking in the now and therefore not only being better prepared but just thinking through how best we might respond. So this is why I think the whole theme of speculation is quite important for us and to think about how speculative we might want to be when doing drugs policy and deliberating on what the alternative drug policy futures are that we might want to consider or even shape or make if we have the power to do so. And I would argue, and I put this before us that maybe some foresight work is still quite proximal it wants to be actionable obviously in policy and it does still maybe tend to lean to some of the stuff which is more measurable and maybe it could be even more speculative than perhaps it often is. So I put that before us as we consider foresight to how we might want to use it in drug policy is how speculative do we want to be? How much do we want to use this as a way of intervening in changing the possible futures that we might be moving towards rather than just guessing what they might or could be? One example, it's a rather obvious one I'm also leaning again on John Corbyn's and his work is some simulation and scenario based work he did around drug policy change in relation for instance, decriminalization or legalization and he described this kind of as a game with players so that it leans very much towards kind of speculation and not prediction. And this kind of simulation on scenario kind of game playing as Corbyn says himself, he says, I would be shocked if looking back after 20 years after having done this, if all or even if the majority of these speculations discussed prove true that's not the point. His goal was to raise questions and provoke discussion not to provide definitive or certain answers. So this is the flavor I think the ethos or speculative work is to deliberate and to work through options and that's why it means. So I've no idea how much time I've got left out here but let's talk about two ways to think about doing this big events and mega trends. I want to mention big events as well as mega trends because we are living in many big events. Ukraine is one such example the COVID-19 pandemic is another and I think they illustrate very well how we can't separate out or isolate drugs from anything else, you know that our social and material economic and policy and political lives are very much an entanglement. They entangle locally but they also relate to the global. So a bigger than is something which can be described and sociologists like to make up new words as global. It's felt both globally and locally and there's interactions going on all the time and you can't separate them out. So our job I think is to try and speculate what those entanglements might be. How am I a war in Ukraine or a pandemic which relating to a viral kind of infection have on bring with it a whole bunch of sometimes unexpected as well as other kind of events and effects which might in turn and indirectly shape drugs and drug markets locally. So big events are usually considered to be unexpected shocks to the ecology of a system. I think I won't say more about them because I think the COVID-19 pandemic and Ukraine offer excellent examples in and of themselves. So let's speculate for a moment about mega trends. Now there's different ways of describing these and the list I have here is a little bit different to that in the toolkit. And this is step one perhaps of the horizon scanning which we might be doing when thinking and speculating on drug futures. But the list here does overlap very much with that in the toolkit. And I just want to kind of illustrate these before I end this presentation as we move more towards drugs and drugs policy. So for instance, we could take any of these and talk about them on more detail and we'll hear more about these in a minute but climate for instance. I mean climate models predict more rain in high latitudes which can lead to flooding for instance, more forceful tropical cyclones, greater wind speed and so on and these potentially alterations in the farming and cultivations of crops. And that includes poppy, it includes cannabis, it includes coca. So you can imagine how these kind of mega trends in terms of climate change alter drug productions. You might foresee for instance, greater shifts towards coca because it's more resilient in some of these conditions ecologically. Or you might imagine shifts towards more laboratory based illicit drug productions. But a point I want to make is any one of these mega trends which we could speculate around, interact and entangle with others. So we can think about the environment in other ways for instance, we can think about how illicit drug productions in and of themselves might alter the ecology. So through toxic waste, through greenhouse gas emissions, through deforestation for instance, through unsustainable water, we can think how drug eradication efforts which attempt to disrupt those illicit drug productions themselves impact ecologically through deforestation, the displacement of populations and their illicit trades and so on. So these things all interact. This importance to see ecological shifts is not a separate but as deeply connected. I could have other examples, but we don't have time. Let's say a word about population. This is maybe getting us closer to the world of drugs and drugs policy perhaps. We have a growing global population particularly in lower income countries and aging one particularly in Europe. We have increased urbanization which of course overlaps with drugs in quite direct ways. We have massive migration flows which again create or exacerbate precarities which indirectly affect drugs either as a coping mechanism or as a source of kind of livelihood and so on. I mean at the population level have growing problems of mental health which again linked to drugs in different ways. So you can see how these populations shifts which are occurring out there at distance are nonetheless having potentially local effects on your drug markets and patterns of drug use. There's many others I could talk about and many of these we're gonna be familiar with and they're all in the toolkit. So I don't think I need to mention too many more but digitalization and major shifts in communication are an obvious one both in terms of drug markets, the ability to do surveillance around them as well as paradigm shifts in research and how we pull together knowledge as well as the role of artificial intelligence and technological digitalized intervention in the drugs field. Drug treatments too, the future is often said to be very biotechnological. There's many many kind of innovations happening as we speak with very unforeseen or unpredictable social consequences we could talk about then we could talk about policy itself and discursive shifts and megatrends and emerging trends which signal different kind of ways of doing policy globally. I would argue for instance you could see signals that there's a general tendency over the last 20 years which move us towards more risk and rights-orientated approaches to drug policy slightly away from criminalization and simple models of supply and demand. We might speculate that we are moving into a post-drug war era who knows but these are the kind of discursive shifts we might be identifying in policies. I'm gonna stop because of time and we need to move more towards the kind of nuts and bolts of the toolkit in terms of how we do foresight work in the drugs and drug policy field. So I'm just gonna conclude with a few points. The first is this is not just about time for me and thinking beyond the present it's about how we think beyond the local and more ecologically and I think that's really, really important. It situates our work in the social and in the economic and in the global space and not just in the local one. Secondly, for me, I think speculation and moving beyond prediction, if you like and beyond probability into the realm of possibility it provokes, it creates deliberation, it creates debate on what the alternative futures might or could be. And I think that's really where foresight work is at its richest and where it is really basically doing intervention through the process of deliberation. So I'm gonna end there and thank you very much for being part of this webinar. Thank you, thank you very much team for this really insightful presentation. I think it already brings us much, much closer to real challenges and issues in the drugs field and it's the perfect follow-up for the more general presentation that Marce started with. I think we're on a journey and getting more and more concrete about topics that are obviously interesting for all the participants who are with us today. I would like to ask the participants to feel free to drop their questions using the Q&A function or on the chat box so that we can really start organizing them and hopefully addressing them at the end of the presentations. But for now I would really like and I'm very happy to introduce my colleagues, Paul and Claudia who will talk a little bit more about the EMC-DDA foresight toolkit which we are launching today. So I'll start by giving the floor to Paul Griffiths who is the scientific director of the EMC-DDA and also the head of the scientific coordination unit where the EMC-DDA futures project is hosted. Paul, the floor is yours. We can see the, yes, that's perfect, perfect. Okay, can you hear me, Maria? Yes, yes. Thanks, Tim, that was a great overview of bringing us towards the drugs area. I'm gonna frame a little bit the toolkit and I really like this idea as foresight is an intervention. And one of the things we don't talk about a lot where it's been used very successfully is as a tool in conflict resolution. And again, it's getting different people with very different perspectives together and trying to get them to imagine a desired common future. So I think it's really important to understand that what we're doing is actually intervening in the present by looking through the future. So just quickly, we've said already the foresight's exercise was including part of our strategy. You didn't really know for us, it was a very much learning exercise. And it was really prompted by the reflection and the recognition that the world is changing ways that had important implications for drug monitoring but our work, our core business, but weren't in the necessarily being driven by things internal to our world. So it was external to our world but changing our world in important ways. And we needed a way to start thinking about that better and understanding that a little bit. And so what I'm going to do here is say a bit about the main findings from the foresight's exercise. It was a modest, it was us putting our toes in this water. And a little bit how it's affected us as an organization in terms of our systems level of thinking. And that's been, I think, one of the key things we've got out of it. And also as a wash on from that, the need for a toolkit, which we're going to present today and I think we'll be pleased with. I think, and again, it comes back to some of the stuff we've heard already. This is not some, it's a journey, not a destination. This is an ongoing task. We're back, if we think, if we were doing this exercise before COVID, before Ukraine, it would be very different than it is after it. It's an ongoing accomplishment. It's to inform our current exercises. And that means this is constantly evolving tasks. So I think this is something we've learned at the organization. It isn't something you do once, take it off. It's something you try and build into your thinking and your systems. So just to give you a little bit, it was a modest exercise, but it's still, I think we did quite impressive amount of work over this. And we had a number of events from a major fee, but there's been addictions in 2019. So we've got lots of different speakers there on the foresight and futures perspective. And then we had lots of different workshops, both with the staff here, with focal points, with a policy group. And what we found from that was almost like an infection because it went on and we saw other different stakeholders wanting to do their own workshops, getting interested in the moving on. I think that was one of the most exciting things for us. Not only did I think it prove value to our stakeholders, it was also a really good way of engaging with our stakeholders and working together co-production being a very core part of this approach. And just in terms of, well, they were very different groups. There was a little bit of group think, we were coming from, you know, struggled sometimes to get outside our own different perspectives. But what was also lots of commonalities and lots of consensus emerging from group. And certainly in terms of the megatrends, the way we looked for the workshop process, you had these five megatrends which most of the groups identified of being particularly salient to the drugs area and they were accelerating technology, change in hyper-connectivity. We worked with the JLC's megatrends toolkit and then looked at those collectively and these are the ones that most of the groups coalesced on, diversified buying inequalities, shifting health challenges, increasing demographic imbalances and climate change and environmental degradation. And Tim said a few words about these. But what I think it's interesting that these came from all the groups, these are not things we normally think about. These are often things that are outside our immediate day-to-day concerns and discourse. And yet when we got together, we talked about them, these are the things that we agreed were profoundly shaping the drugs world. So I get just a very simple example I think why these approaches are beneficial. And then at the second level that was looking at emerging trends and weak signals coming from the drugs area. And again, there was, I think from the groups we had a lot of diversity, a lot of different directions, but a number of things emerged from that commonalities and there was a lot of focus and shifting in terms of drug policies and drug laws. So are we moving towards more harm rather than criminalization policies? How can a policy is changing, alternatives to imprisonment? So a whole range about the shift in the policy discourse but also a shift beyond that in concepts of addiction whether it's in terms of normalization but also extending it to behavioral addictions and also the overlap between some of the, how we think about addiction and the use of substances and some of the beneficial things we might see in terms of new therapies. There was a big and a lot of focus and I think possibly thing in shifting drug markets, looking at how these were becoming more globalized and digitally enabled. So more globally connected, rising importance of synthetic drugs, production close to consumers, increasing diversity, things like medicine, the blurring of distinction between medicines, NPS and the controlled and uncontrolled substances. And also how this was also washing through and again this globalized and digital approach into how we respond. So looking at how services were adapting and the health initiatives but also new pharmotherapies that are becoming online and also the locating of the work we do, the therapeutic work we do in a much broad context of health and wellness and generic services. And just to show you a little bit about how that all maps out when you put it all together we've got the sort of context of the day and we're looking at these emerging trends in the drugs field and then we're reflecting that in a broad horizon of how wider changes in the ecology as Tim called it impacting. And again, I think this, some of these, the graphical representations that you developed for this work are really helpful because they help you conceive the world in different ways than we're normally the way we look at things which is very linear thinking. And how, and I think this is for me one of the kind of obvious but good things are often obvious once you realize them ways it affects to our systems thinking. And as an organization, as a monitoring agency tasked with doing the work we do really we need to think systemically and really we have our routine monitoring and that's based in the past it's robust it's reliable, we can quantify uncertainty often but it's not reactive. And then we've got the things Tim were talking about the more early warning threat assessment is more proactive these are emerging signals it seems we're following up we need to investigate a little bit there's far greater uncertainty there and then we move on there's four sites and this is where we get much more speculative but very active because there's also this idea of anticipating and maybe creating and anticipating and avoiding negative futures and identifying and working towards more positive futures. And I think as in terms of the way we think systematically about how we use information we really want to within our systems do all these things and recognizing that all of them are necessary all of them have strengths all of them have weakness or differences in terms of both certainty and use report to them but at a systems level we want to incorporate all these things into our thinking and I think as an agency that's been a very important outcome for us in terms of looking at this work. So just finding terms of the outcomes from our initial and I must say modest delve into this area I think we've much better now understanding the role and the value of futures and foresight work in our day-to-day work and how we need to continue that and build that into our process and our working practice. And I think in doing that we recognize that it has advantages for today it is an intervention it can help us become a more agile forward-looking agency and make our staff more sensitive about how some of these things are impacting on today's work and how they need to think about that for things are developing even in the short term. We set up a repository tools and methods this is an area where understanding and information sources are growing very quickly so just having these in one place has been really useful and it's made us aware of how much activity is happening at the EU level in terms of the EU infrastructure and the value of actually networking and reaching out in the JRC have been particularly helpful in this respect. It's given us certainly generous and little insights into future information needs and areas that might be very important so it's important our thinking today about what we might do in the future. And it's been, again, I didn't really expect this it's been a really useful catalyst and tool for activities with stakeholders and in that this co-production thing actually working with stakeholders has changed our thinking but also been valuable to them. So it's been a really important and useful communication tool. And from that, the idea of the toolkit came out because we saw a lot of interest amongst the stakeholders groups and that's very much what the thinking about why we've crystallized this into a set of tools that we will use ourselves in-house but we also making available for various stakeholders who want to embark on their own foresight or future's journey. And that's all I want to say except just to leave on this quote from William Gibson, the future's here it's just not evenly distributed yet. Many of the things that we look at and think about in the drugs field that we think of future developments for their drug delivery by drones it's psychoactive medicines being supplied in the post or it's beer that contains THC these are actually happening parts of the world now. So a lot of some of these future things are actually already happening but often outside our vision. Thank you. And that's my introduction to Claudia and the toolkit. Thank you very much Paul that was a great overview on the journey we're going through and also thank you for the excellent time keeping. I now give the floor to Claudia who is the project lead for the future's project at the MCDDA. Claudia is also the principal scientific manager who is working with Paul and I at the scientific coordination unit and she will now present to you the toolkit that we're launching today. Claudia, the floor is yours. Thank you, Maria. Can you hear me? Can you see the slides? Yes, absolutely. All great. I'm really excited to present to the MCDDA foresight toolkit for the drug skills which is really a practical guide on how to prepare and run the trans workshop. So something a bit practical grown from the theoretical part but hopefully useful. So I will elaborate a bit on why we've developed the toolkit but Paul already mentioned several of the important elements for whom it was created and how we can apply it in practice. So basically as mentioned by Paul I think we are giving you results of our journey and our capacity building and future literacy building within the MCDDA. We were looking at different methods and techniques that are applied in the futures area and also how different organizations and new institutions are applying foresight in different policy fields but also in different settings. We were also looking at different capacity building tools that they were developing and this is how our thinking was steered. And as you've heard, we had this first exercise which looked into the future of the drug monitoring by 2030. So our horizon was 10 years and we've selected one of the tools that Machiav mentioned which is an environmental scanning a holistic analysis, 300 degrees analysis of the external environment, analysis of trends, events that are impacting drugs area but they are going much more beyond the drugs area and beyond Europe as well. So what you can see is basically the environmental scanning as mentioned many times was framed by the megatrends of joint research center and the weak signals or emerging trends in the drug situation were very much informed by the intelligence collected by the MCDDA, some additional data collection, analysis and information and also the work prepared by team as well informing our analysis of the drug situation. And the trends we were looking at were of societal, technological, economical, ecological and political nature. And this is really, I think this is the key that we had a framework that made our analysis possible in a systematic way. And I think for science-based organization in general is a particularly important. But as Paul mentioned, what was important was this participatory and collective sense making and vision sharing. So we've invited a lot of our stakeholders to the trends workshop. And that's particularly important for this toolkit because it explains you how to prepare these workshops. And we've invited our partners, we've invited researchers, analysts, policymakers but also communication experts to really brainstorm and also to bring their own ideas on what are the changes that are happening or will impact the drugs area and will have direct impact into the work of the MCD and the drug monitoring system in the future in general. Same thing with intellectually intensive exercise, new and engaging. And again, I want to highlight what Paul was saying as much as methods are important. We were really building our future mindset, future oriented mindset. People were open, people who started to be aware about the changes outside of the area of work. And as mentioned before, really everyone was asking how we can replicate this activity, how we can do that at our institutional level or even at the national or ministry level. So basically the toolkit we are publishing today is a response to our customers needs. And it aims to support the EMCBD stakeholders, actors, researchers in the drug field to implement their own foresight exercise in the form of an introductory trans-based workshop. Again, it builds on the toolkit developed by the Joint Reset Center, which we found very useful but it also builds on our work at the EMCBDA and you will find the trend card specific for the drugs area, which are actually outcomes of this joint deliberation and speculations with our community. We tried this, I think we've created and I think we try to believe that it's very practical, easy to use and simple. And it really describes how you go through the whole process step by step. Still the guiding questions are really looking at 300 degrees of analysis of your environment. So the quick questions are, what kind of changes you can observe already? Why these changes are happening at what speed? What does it mean for your organizations, for your actions, for your work? And which changes should we be prepared for? Which we would like to avoid or foster? And this is again, this notion of taking futures something you can shape rather than something given. You're working with the futures for your current actions. But in terms of the content of the toolkit, you will find an introduction to foresight and a bit of explanation of how the trans-analysis should look like. You will find there are tools and templates for running the workshop and some references to additional information and sources if you want to go deeper into the foresight. So as I mentioned, you will go through the key phases of the process. So we are explaining how the trans-workshop should be organized, how the agenda can be shaped, who should be invited to these meetings, how you should facilitate them, but also what should be the objective of your meeting. And I think this we are putting emphasis on being realistic. Obviously in one hour and a half or three hours, four hours, you will not manage to create a future proof strategy for your organization, but you will definitely gain an insight into the changes impacting the drugs area and consequently your work. You can also, I would say that that's also important to gain the curiosity within the organization and this willingness to do this type of work. We are explaining typical steps of trans-analysis and you will see how you start with identification and mapping of the trends, what to do not to miss or overlook critically potentially high impact development. So the blind spots, how to identify them and what is the role of really broad and inclusive exercise as Marcelle is mentioning. How you can prioritize the trends. So we cannot address all the changes we are thinking about or we are seeing, but how you build a consensus of what are the critical and most impactful trends for your area of work and then what are the actions to be taken. And again, for each step of this analysis we are providing templates, some with the examples of how we did it within the ANC BDA, but also some empty templates you can use for your work. And also you will find online trends cards and some of the conclusions of our work and also some recommendations on how to do the activity on site or online. We started as Paul mentioned this whole exercise before COVID, so we've managed to have few trend workshops face-to-face organized, but then with the pandemic, we had to switch to online and mode and it works perfectly well. I think with today communication tools like we have now, but also online and tool sharing applications and text sharing applications, it's possible and it works and we also encourage you to do that. And then some key issues for considerations because I'm mindful of the time. It's important to think then and to keep in mind that this toolkit presents only a fraction of activities and perspective utilized in fully-fledged trend analysis. So ideally we would complement the trends workshop with additional research and analysis steps, but still we believe that as a standalone work, it's a taster of the approach of working with trends and it really covers the main steps that you would do while analyzing the trends. Also as Paul mentioned, it's a living document. Also this toolkit is a living document. So we are really curious to hear your experience in applying this toolkit, what we could improve on our website, but also what are the results of your work? What are the additional trends that you've identified? Because as mentioned before, we are moving over the time, new really destructive things are happening. So I'm sure they will also impact the analysis within your institution or organization. And again, I think we imagined our focal points to use it, but also group of researchers or policy organization, but I think it's for anyone, any individual who wants to go through this analytical process. And finally, we are planning within the EMCVD some capacity activities and trainings for our stakeholders, but we are also really pleased to hear that there are already other initiatives happening within the drugs area, which will be mentioned by our stakeholders later today and we are really excited about that. So I would say go to our website, go through the material that we've collected and published, and we are really grateful for any feedback or questions that you may have. Thank you very much, Claudia. I'm also mindful of the time, there would be a lot to say on this. And I've already copy pasted the link to the toolkit which was launched and is already available publicly on our website. The link is in the chat box, but I would straight ahead go to Brian Galvin for some additional insights on practical implementations aspect, aspects of working with Foresight and having already the experience of implementing this approach. Brian is the head of the Irish Raytox National Focal Point and a program manager for drug and alcohol research at the Health Research Board Evidence Centre in Ireland. And he will also be covering for these who unfortunately last minute could not join us. So Brian, thank you very much for joining us and the floor is yours. Okay, thanks very much, Maria. I just want to give some quick observations and thoughts on our experience. We held a megatrans workshop as part of our National Drugs Forum in Dublin. This is an annual event to me from the stakeholders, it's a very broad group. So it includes not just the type of policymakers and researchers that are comfortable with the type of relation that Tim mentioned are global issues, but everybody working in the drugs area. I think it's important that we manage to include them because it's not just a democratic issue, but it allows us to have insights that we wouldn't normally have if we confined it to our senior stakeholders. It's important to introduce the concept of force that right through our drug stakeholder. So just a couple of takeaways, operation. The interactive work of this type does take a lot of planning. And the event that we held in 2021 was online which did present its own difficulties. I said the bulk of the discussion as we prepared the workshop was on how we'd manage the interactions and the various working groups, how discussions were to be led and first rotated. The recording and the role of the visitors. So we didn't give a huge attention to the choosing the megatrends. It's in a way that her topics were, I think, secondary. The important thing was to get people into a way of thinking about it. So that took quite a lot of work before we even sat down. The next key takeaway is facilitation. We recruited, I think, 12 facilitators. And these were people that I knew that would be capable and willing to lead a discussion. I think it's essential. I think local facilitators with knowledge of the issues and the personalities, they're the best place to adapt, to keep discussion on track and to deal with potentially tricky situations. And Jessica led a training session with these facilitators that went on a lot longer. I think that we have anticipated because people have a lot of questions, but they became unengaged. So that's who leads facilitators. These are the key things that you have to think about before you do and it kind of works up like this. I said that the megatrends themselves weren't the most important thing, but it's important to work with many megatrends at the same time. And I was clear from the groups, the observations that were recorded as a lot of megatrends they overlapped and reinforced impact that are like things like climate change is very quickly linked to migration, which is of course linked to housing and the built environment and place-based issues in drugs has been a real concern in Ireland. So these things all wrap around each other. Things like the aging population and the demands on health services, is that going to harden attitudes to people who's drugs but never even considered that. So these are things that emerge from people with direct experience of working in the situation. So finally, we asked people to do quite easy exercises. And that's important. And Jessica was pretty good on that. Don't be too ambitious, stick to the plan. The responses were imaginative and thoughtful. And I think we did succeed in reducing the basic concept of what's out to people. But the impact of these kind of one-off sessions is quite limited. I have to admit that it was enjoyable, it was fun. But if we're going to do further work in this area, I'd imagine we'd work with people who are enthusiastic, who are naturally inclined to think in that way and they could develop a deeper understanding of ideas and they could work within their own spheres and gradually introduce the concept to others. I'm thinking of a type of train the trainer approach, something similar that's used in the UBC, UBC. So that's a very quick run through the Dublin event. And I got notes from Lise on a drug prep. Unfortunately, Lise was called away to another very important meeting with her daughter who I think is about four weeks old at the moment. So the drug prep, the application of the drug prep was prepared by Lise and John Peter in Trimbos. So they're the people who have the detailed knowledge of it just to let you know that. But drug prep is a DGJOS funded research project and it's partners in six European countries. I started by Trimbos in the Netherlands and Centaño in Belgium. So the idea is to support policy makers and researchers and civil society to become prepared for the response to threats. So the objectives, and these are across the five working packages of the six working packages of the project. And we're beginning with to identify and assess current needs and responses to emerging drug problems in European countries. And work on that has begun already. The next objective is to identify trends and developments and that's using the Tritage and Foresight tools. So I'm sure the toolkit itself will be of some use in that. Strengthening capacity building of national system systems by an experience of preparedness and foresight. And finally, translate game knowledge into the national policy demand. I think that's the most challenging part of this. And as Lise pointed out or not to me, a big part of the impulse to do this work is to build on the knowledge translation work that all the focal points are interested in. It's a continual challenge. How do we ensure that our data analysis is used in policy decisions? So I think Lise, I hope I'm not paraphrasing her too much. There is a certain frustration there and even with all the various techniques and tools that we have of trying to get evidence into policy, it's still not as where we are. So we see this as an opportunity to speak to policy makers in a language or a tone that they will find, we think extremely useful as they're interested. It's a challenge. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much, Brian. Thank you for sharing the experience with us. I think this is really important for anyone who wants to take this up and move towards the implementation level. And I think that also the journey is bringing us, it's very encouraging for us to see how member states are picking this up. And I think the journey brings us to this participatory approach and collective intelligence that Maciej was mentioning at the very beginning. I see we have very little time left but I don't want to end this before giving the floor to Cornelia Dahem because Cornelia who is the founder and director of Future Impacts, Future Impacts is a company that supports organization in and with foresight projects and they have been our external contractors on this project and Cornelia leads a team of brilliant and wonderful people who have really been amazing in terms of the support that was given to the MCDDA. So Cornelia, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Maria. Thank you everyone. Glad to be here and I'm a bit flustered by the kindness. Glad to hear that and it's a pleasure to be a part of this process. And yeah, being aware of the time also, I'll make it very short. There's lots to say I think but also maybe we still have a moment left to take a couple of questions and let me just try not really to wrap up now because I think we have a portfolio of pieces of information around foresight in our hands now but maybe just say a bit of things as a taster towards what's to come because while you have a toolkit now in your hands everybody is joining here. There's also as we have seen in the presentations before a lot of other questions apart from looking at trends that you could cover in foresight and something around this is coming up. You've seen that the perspectives and tools are broad and wide but on the other hand you could also break it down very much when you try to build foresight capacity and I think many of you are maybe here because they want to start that kind of factors and while it's of course a simplification you could say that most foresight exercises in a way take these two fundamental perspectives of on the one hand horizon scanning looking at the changes that are out there where now you have the starting point of the toolkit by EMCDDA to really put this into practice in a practicable way to take first steps gain some experience see how it can work in your organization in your context but then the horizon scanning maybe probably cannot answer all questions and scenarios are really a way to then go into a more you could say speculative space where in the horizon scanning you start from a perspective of asking what changes can we already see how can we make sense of the stuff where we have the evidence in our hands where we can observe the past and today in a way with the scenarios you can go towards this more speculative arena of thinking about alternative futures also a term I think you have heard quite a bit and we've heard already about why that might make sense but just to say there's two fellacies the scenarios can help with one is that we tend to imagine the future is kind of a thing of the present Harry Ford has said if I had asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse so we tend to think something like today but just a little bit better and that well hasn't worked so much we've heard a couple of words already and people have spoken before about disruption and we have all been in the midst of disruption in the last two years with the pandemic now the Ukraine war just to name the top ones and the upcoming climate crisis the ongoing climate crisis is the next one to keep us busy but just to have that said you maybe don't want to acknowledge it but disruption has been around for quite some time September 11th Fukushima financial crisis that has all been there and it's tough to make sense of it in organizational planning but on the other hand the signals have been there and scenarios can be a great tool to sort of make sense of how we could deal with disruption which ones we have to prepare for maybe and where it would help if we had a backup plan in our desks and all these examples have been part of foresight reports but also Bill Gates do so it is possible to scan a bit for disruption too and scenarios are just simply a great tool to do so and think about these alternative pathways and that's really what's upcoming and where we have the pleasure again to work with and for EMCDDA to get that on the road so this is just a taster and a preview we've just started working on this and scenarios will be developed and it will use two principles that I think characterize very much the force and capacity building work that EMCDDA is doing which is on the one hand to utilize existing resources which we have really in our hands in Europe in many, many ways as much as possible and not reinvent the wheel where we don't have to maybe so we're starting from what's there already in the Trends Toolkit, in the EMCDDA foresight reports all the trends that have been identified will sort of play a part in creating the backbone of the scenarios which to become not too technical now are developed in a transparent key factor-based kind of approach there's various scenario methodologies but this one lends itself to doing it this kind of way and the second principle is again a deep involvement of the stakeholders and the community I would call it so it's a you I guess and hope and just to flag that and to end on that note there will be a workshop hopefully also focusing on this at the Lisbon Addictions Conference where also all these perspectives from the different stakeholders can again be integrated into that process and I'll not try more for that Maria if that's okay I'll just leave it here and maybe have we have a bit of time so for questions or whatever you have in mind okay Thank you Cornelia thank you for being really brief and I'm thinking because we are starting questions and answer sessions and we don't have much time left so maybe I will start with the first question and you may try to answer to it but it's open to all the panelists so if anyone wants to to elaborate on that we have a question about participation, inclusiveness and how different groups could be invited to this exercise so it's more about what do we have to think about when we are thinking of our participants of the workshops how broad the group should be you know how to avoid this group thinking that everyone is so afraid of if you could elaborate on that a bit Yeah again I'll try briefly though I could go on now with the house but I'll try not to as diverse as you can without going overboard would be a sort of blueprint I think when you get started so not to get only the same people who always discuss matters into the same room but maybe more of a mix but at the same time I would also recommend which I think is a learning for most organizations to go on that journey of building for capacity to maybe not start with too big a group because you are still probably figuring out how you can implement this well so maybe start with a workshop where you have a smaller group unless you have a lot of experience in how to do that already and then build from there so take it a step-by-step approach but diversity is a key criterion in most foresight processes going out to a board a subutation of you could say citizens the population maybe in this case also clients or drug users or social policy on the ground which has also happened and been done before but still I'd say as much as diversity as you can but building it step-by-step to gain some experience of how it can be done well in your context and be usable in the end Thank you, thank you for a lot for the presentation I'm answering and maybe the second question because I think it was brought by Brian as well is how we make sure that the findings of the foresight are really taken up by the organization so how we make sure that within the organizational context the findings are taken on board and maybe Machi wants to elaborate a bit on that how it works at the EU level as well or anyone who would like to respond to these questions what do you have to do to make it work as much as it does Yeah, yeah I think so I've been I've been also busy replying to the questions in the meantime so we and I think what I wanted particularly to say is around the issue as there's few minutes you know people have this tendency that well there's some people in the EU creating these futures for everyone and I think this isn't at all the purpose of the exercises we're doing so our involvement tends to be kind of as broad as possible in a way and it can be done in a different way so also with the digital with kind of digital approaches to get people's input to actually have their stories heard but to make it happen even kind of in a practical way we actually went out and got together so what you are doing also is actually bring the toolkits out to everyone and get people to do these exercises all over Europe or anywhere in the world and actually get the results in and start sharing them between the groups and getting people to to discuss what is similar what is different and we've been doing that also with both toolkits in other areas and there's been a broad of sort of what we get is much more much more often kind of diverse and different than what we get in normal public consultations and it complements these consultations in a very interesting way in how people have kind of replied to these questions but also in how people kind of imagine the future so this kind of spreading of toolkits but also creating communities of people who will work with them and actually getting the results and bringing those results into the thinking of the commission that is very useful and to also realize that okay, it's a toolkit but everybody's free to to put it in their context to actually use them in their own context and to not kind of be too strict with what we accept or not I think that's kind of the key to using those toolkits so they are not only kind of a prescriptive they are kind of an enabling factor in getting people to think about the future okay, thank you very much and I would like to thank to all the panelists because I think we are really approaching towards the end of the webinar we would really encourage you to send us questions by email and we will be responding to all of them because I think the time is really running so thank you once again for all the contributions and being with us today and I think I will hand it over now to the director of the MCB for the closing part of the meeting Thank you, thank you Claudia thank you everybody I think it was a very special webinar very intensive a bit more speakers than usually so I know the reason and I'm fully supportive it was looking more like a distance course because it's so rich and I think it's bringing so many new things and I think it's illustrated by the fact that it's a bit less popular than the previous webinars because if you are not a bit familiar with what it is probably you are not going to connect for two hours on the topic like that just at the first time but I think to have gathered around 100 persons for one and half hour to listen and to hear and to react or to ask some questions either today or by email it's a very good point a bit of answer to Huiko Imbra I think the toolkit is for all so it's not something for the elite and I think it's a bit also what Massage was saying so it's not something that is that is just for the elite of people who allow themselves to think and therefore it has to be appropriated by everybody including people who are using drug services and of course if we do these exercises and that's it's the idea behind the way we work on it at EMCDDA we should we should associate it to involve all stakeholders including people who are using drugs or people working in drug services so a few quotes and then a final remark because I know we need to close I really would like to highlight what Tim said I think it was a fantastic presentation Tim as always we said you said working on the futures has already an impact in the now foresight is an intervention in the now I really like very much this this point you made it a few times in your presentation because I think it's part of the reflection we started already years ago asking or say okay we are collecting statistics but what for I mean we we have a data collection system on drugs but what's the purpose for whom what is the expected result and so thinking about the foresight of futures is part of this approach but immediately the way you have to learn how to ask the questions is not only for futures but it has an impact on what you already do daily so thank you and you also say that speculation for speculation that's something I find extremely important the goal is to deliberate to raise questions rather than really the the answers we are going to find at least a short term then there was a Paul who presented together with Claudia what we tried to do and Claudia presented brilliantly the toolkit and and and from Paula I would quote that he said the futures is a journey rather than a destination and what I would link this with another kind of journey that Brian shared with us and he shared also the experience from these and the colleagues and friends from Centsano, Trimbos and the others is the fact that there is also frustration and in trying to make decision makers for instance but they are not the only ones to understand what we try to tell them or to make use of the evidence and Brian you mentioned somewhere in your during your presentation that we could use this and the toolkit and the methodology to find a common language and I think for me one of the key words are associated with this work is co-production which means that many times for us also at TMCDDA we can have a fantastic project fantastic data nobody cares how can we convince them when nobody cares about it and where there are no magic solution sorry to disappoint you but the thing is with this kind of exercise and method well you need to involve more people so if they are a bit involved if they know a bit why do you do that and if they also have maybe in some of the workshop can express their questions their concerns or their ideas maybe again it's not magic but maybe they can they can be a bit more receptive to what you would like to share with them if it is only something I don't know I don't mean it's your case but if it's only for instance EMCDDA or the focal point with some drug services or with people who are using drugs the probability that the others will listen to us it's very low by definition so for me the foresight method the toolkit offer one more way a different way to deal with that as we need to finish and before to bring you the final word on this I would like to refer to two things that came to my mind when I was listening to all the presentation the first is CICAT OAS 7, 8 or 9 years ago they made for the first time scenario exercise and foresight exercise that led to the production of four scenarios and this was a very interesting exercise but the results have been completely lost and I think probably part is probably due to the changes also in the organization the political priorities but my the souvenir that I had from the moment they published and shared with us was that the scenarios they were presented to be like the final result which means that nobody knew exactly what to think about those and what can we do with those scenarios is it that the future will be automatically be one of them does it mean we have to choose and I think probably this was one of the main and also probably I would guess that probably some countries or some participating countries in the exercise wanted to push for a political choice because it was before Ungas it was the moment where especially from the Americas they wanted to move from the war on drugs to a more balanced policy including public health and I imagine that that's the reason why some scenarios were looking maybe more actually this may happen than others and therefore I think the difficulties or the fact that it looks like it has not been really used after is probably influenced by some of those factors the second thing I've been thinking about especially from the last presentation is a fantastic book from Nassim Nikolaas Taiyeb which is called The Black Swan and in some of the big events that were mentioned in some of the presentation I think this idea developed by Nikolaas Taiyeb and others about the fact that there are other probabilities and that in the current economy we try to use the cheapest one and the simplest one because they reduce dramatically the likelihood that something may happen and because this likelihood is kind of artificially reduced because if it wasn't it may cost more that's the reason why for Fukushima the anti-tsunami world was not built as it could have been because there were some quite cheap and easy to make probability that say that that's the most impossible that it would take that the tsunami could be up to seven meters high other probabilities other methods may have suggested different risks and again this has to be with the way we look at those probabilities so what is our intention and what are the next steps for EMCDD and I think Paul and Claudia presented already a big part of it I would summarize the new service offered by the EMCDDA that is free for use that can count on some expert support relatively limited for the moment in the future to be more available and better offered by the EMCDDA because it's part of what is covered by our new business model but also by the new mandate of the center which means also that there may be more human resources and more financial means and the idea is to provide in the future training of trainers as we do for the EUPC this should be co-production and for me the rule should be free to use for everybody one condition you should share your experience with us if it is just to use the toolkit that is not even belonging only to EMCDDA and you don't enter in the exchange I think you miss part of the philosophy of the tool just to stress it like that and I conclude with one of the last sentences of message because that's what we ultimately want to create with the support active support of EMCDDA is to create a community of people who use the toolkit and the methodology to share reflections ideas about what could happen as far as drugs are concerned in the future and by definition it's not the private property or copyright of anyone but we have the ambition as we do for other areas of work to be one of the engines not the only one behind the creation of such a community of parties so thank you very much