 First of all, I'd like to thank you all for coming here today. I'd also like to thank IDPC for organising the practicalities of this event, which is extremely helpful to us, thanks to the IDPC team. I'd also like to thank the funders of this project that we'll be launching today. The Open Society Foundation, the Allen Lane Foundation, the Esmwy Fairbane Foundation and Glasshouse Trust, who have all contributed to what we'll be doing today. My name is Martin Powell. I work for the Transform Drugs Policy Foundation, but I'm also the coordinator for this Counting the Cost project. I've mentioned, and you will already know, we're here to launch what's a new global campaign and website called The War on Drugs, Count the Costs and Explore Alternatives. You will already have noticed on your seats there are the first two briefings for this project, which I'd very much like you to take home with you, so we don't have to take them with us. There are also additional copies over there if anyone would like them. Do let us know if there aren't enough, if you need any for your group or anything like that, and we can send you some. This project is and launch is being supported by a range of groups with a range of views and backgrounds. They include the International Harm Reduction Association, the International Drug Policy Consortium, the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, the Drug Policy Alliance, Espaola, Release, Transform, the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, Cupid, Transnational Institute, International Center for Science and Drug Policy, the New Zealand Drug Policy Foundation and the Washington Office on Latin America. In terms of this project, the first thing I'd like to make quite clear about where we're going with this is that we recognize the potential huge benefits from having an international consensus on our approach to drugs. Not simply in terms of regulating their scientific and medical use, though clearly that is very useful, but beyond that as well. And this project isn't about dismantling or destroying any international system, it's about ensuring we have the best one that's possible. However, that said, after 50 years of the war on drugs and trillions of dollars being spent, what we see delivered is a massive increase in supply and use over that time. So, as we all know, illegal drugs are now one of the largest commodity trades on the planet. And that's also something that the new head of the UNODC has said in the last couple of days as well. That's not contentious, I know. But we also know, because the previous head of the UNODC, well we knew it anyway, we didn't need telling it, but the previous head of the UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa, has said that that punitive enforcement-led approach known as the war on drugs has had huge unintended negative consequences. And I would actually like to quote what he said, so we know where we're at with that. First unintended negative consequence is a huge criminal black market that thrives in order to get prohibited substances from producers to consumers. The second unintended consequence is what one might call policy displacement. The expanding criminal black market obviously demanded a commensurate law enforcement response and more resources. The consequence was that public health was displaced into the background, more honoured in lip service and rhetoric, but less in actual practice. The third unintended consequence, according to Mr Costa, is geographical displacement. It is often called the balloon effect because squeezing by tighter controls in one place produces a swelling, namely an increase in another place. The fourth unintended consequence is what one might call substance displacement. If the use of one drug was controlled by reducing either supply or demand, suppliers and users move on to another drug. The fifth unintended consequence is the way we perceive and deal with the users of illicit drugs. A system appears to have been created in which those who fall into the web of addiction find themselves excluded and marginalised from the social mainstream, tainted with a moral stigma and often unable to find treatment, even when they may be motivated to want it. Now let's be clear about this. These harms stem from the punitive enforcement-led approach itself, not from drug use per se. Although, of course, those harms are very real, very important, and a lot of work is done in assessing those and analysing the level of them. All the organisations involved in this initiative do recognise their importance and are deeply concerned about them. But what hasn't been done to date is the assessment of these unintended negative consequences laid out so clearly by Mr Costa and his 2008 paper Fifth Purpose. In order to make those costs a little easier to access, a little easier to assess and engage others in, this project has broken Costa's unintended consequences down a little bit further. So what we're saying now within this project is that choosing the War on Drugs approach that, by its nature, places control of the trade in the hands of organised crime and criminalises many users is leading to the undermining of international development and security and the fuelling of conflict. It's threatening public health, spreading disease and causing death. It's undermining human rights. It's promoting stigma and discrimination and it's creating crime and enriching criminals. It also causes deforestation and pollution and wastes billions on ineffective law enforcement. But the War on Drugs is a policy choice and we believe that it's vital that we explore the alternatives. We debate and explore the alternatives and we look at this through the lens of the best available evidence and the best available analysis so we can count the costs of the current system and the benefits to and compare it meaningfully with those alternatives so that in future we can actually result in a much better system than we currently have now that hopefully does not have those kind of levels of unintended consequence. We also believe that by breaking down these costs in this way into these seven sections we're going to be able to reach out to those who work, the experts, the NGOs, the government departments who work on those policy areas, development, human rights, treasuries, the whole range of them, many of whom's voices simply have not been heard to date clearly in this debate but who have expertise that we feel would be vital in terms of taking this agenda forward. In addition to, so in terms of the project itself, which you've found on your chair, there's one briefing we've done already which summarises each of those seven cost areas. There's also one there about the international development and security costs. We are going to be producing briefings of that kind for all the other cost areas with a view to producing a report combining them at the end of the year but possibly more importantly this website which is up on the right hand side here, we intend to become a resource library that's of interest and use to anyone who cares about any of these cost areas that we're talking about. We are populating that and in terms of resources we're talking about evidence that's factual, in terms of written reports, videos, images, audio, all manner of media that we want to place on this in a searchable form to create a library that will start to lay out those costs and help with that process of assessing what they are. I would invite all of you in this room, whether you've come from a country delegation, an NGO or an academic background, please do submit pieces of evidence you think are important that should be on that website. Again, I would emphasise we're not looking for unanimity here. There will be pieces of evidence there that we may not be 100% comfortable with that others may not be. There is a comment on the website saying that that's the case, we may not agree with everything. What we're interested in though is capturing as broad a spectrum as possible to start that evidence-based review going. Of course, that does rather beg the question, why is this necessary in the first place? The fact is that no international body or government has to date properly counted the costs of the war on drugs, let alone gone on to explore alternatives in this way. The people involved in this campaign feel that it really is about time that was done. It's also a good time for this to happen. There is resonance out there in the world now around this happening with policy makers increasingly making similar calls. Before I talk about the speakers, I'll just give you one last quote which is from President Santos of Colombia just a couple of months ago saying, there are some fundamental structural contradictions in the war on drugs. We in Colombia have been successful, but our success is hurting the whole of Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean, Africa, and eventually it will backfire on us again. So are we pursuing the correct long-term policy? I don't object to discussing any alternatives, but if we are going to discuss alternatives, let's discuss every alternative, what is the cost, what is the benefit of each alternative, and that sums up very nicely what this project is about.