 This year the presence of civil society was stronger than ever. The New York based harm reduction coalition made sure that government delegates get the message about harm reduction with a powerful photo exhibition at the entrance. We brought our photo display to commission on our credit drugs this year. We shot maybe 500 people also at our national conference in Baltimore last year and we had four themes. We had overdose, stigma, drug treatment and harm reduction. And we wanted people to put into their own words what that meant to them and how it impacted them and how it affected them. And we paired the message with their face because what this really is all about to us is the people that are impacted by drugs and drug policy and harm reduction and we wanted to show those faces. Let's bring the language of harm reduction inside the UN. Let's have it here for the diplomats to let them see that this is something that works and get used to it because we're here and not going anywhere. And I want to see that change. I want to see demand reduction, supply reduction, harm reduction. So harm reduction decade. We launched a new campaign at CND this week in fact today and this campaign is calling on governments to recognise the funding crisis for harm reduction. Currently just 7% of what is needed to fund harm reduction fully around the world is invested in harm reduction in times of austerity and when health care budgets are stretched that asking for more money from health care budgets perhaps is unrealistic but what we do also know is that within other areas of drug policy like law enforcement and punitive approaches to drugs huge amounts of money is spent every year on approaches that we know not only are ineffective and don't work but they actually increased people's harm and risk related to drugs. So what we're asking for is a balance in terms of what's currently being spent in drug policy and we're calling on governments to recommit and rebalance their current spend and we're asking for 10% of the 100 billion dollars that's currently spent on law enforcement approaches around the world to be redirected to harm reduction. In the old days NGOs would be shunted on to the end of a session if there was time but the chairs this year have been ensuring that civil society voices are threaded throughout the discussions and I think as we lead into UNGAS I think that sets a real good tone for a more honest and confronting debate about all of these issues. I need to see the global network of over 113 NGOs from over 50 countries from all regions of the world and our network comes together to promote open and objective debates in drug policy making. We are far from achieving the main target stated in the political integration of 2009 so we cannot keep pretending that the current international drug policy is working well. In 2006, President Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs in Mexico with the support of the United States. Rather than having cops on the streets who are trained to serve and protect they put the military on the streets. They militarized our public security. Since 2006 we've had over 100,000 people who have been killed. Over 26,000 people have been disappeared. This means we don't know where they are. Eradication prior to the establishment of alternative livelihoods pushes people deeper into poverty, fosters human rights violations, social unrest, instability and violence undermining already tenuous government legitimacy and nascent institution building. Forced eradication can fuel local insurgencies and hence civil conflict and internal displacement. More often than not alternative development programs are designed with one primary objective in mind which is to reduce the cultivation of prohibited plants. Such policies or programs may lead to short term reductions but they are ultimately doomed to failure in the long run as we have seen again and again. Instead what we need to be doing is promoting equitable economic world development and if we do that right proper reductions will follow. West Africa faces a very specific set of issues around security, being a transit route but also seeing increasing levels of drug use. When you move maybe to a region like Asia we see the government positions in Asia quite entrenched. The policies there are incredibly repressive. There is an over reliance on compulsory detention for drug users for example and in the last few years we have seen a stronger return to that kind of policy. Obviously the widespread use of the death penalty for drug offences also in that region.