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Commission Mondiale sur la Politique des Drogues

Lettre ouverte "Il est temps d’avoir une nouvelle approche de la politique des drogues"

Dans une lettre rendue publique à l’issue d’une rencontre qui s’est tenue la semaine dernière à New York, la Commission Mondiale sur la Politique des Drogues à la suite de son rapport remis en juin au secrétaire général des Nations Unies Ban Ki Moon, résume dans cette "lettre ouverte", l’essentiel de ses convictions et recommandations "la guerre mondiale aux drogues a échouée, il est temps d’avoir une nouvelle approche".

Dans l’attente d’une traduction française, voici ce qu’il faut en retenir : La politique de prohibition des drogues est en échec total, la réforme de la convention unique de 1961 devient une urgente nécessité :

"Au nom de la santé publique, de la réduction des risques, de l’efficacité des moyens budgétaires consacrés et du respect des droits humains fondamentaux. De plus en plus de preuves démontrent que de telles approches sont meilleures que la simple criminalisation."

Public Letter

THE GLOBAL WAR ON DRUGS HAS FAILED

IT IS TIME FOR A NEW APPROACH

WE THE UNDERSIGNED call on members of the public and of Parliament to recognise that :-

Fifty years after the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was launched, the global war on drugs has failed, and has had many unintended and devastating consequences worldwide.

Use of the major controlled drugs has risen, and supply is cheaper, purer and more available than ever before. The UN conservatively estimates that there are now 250 million drug users worldwide.

Illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industry in the world, after food and oil, estimated to be worth $450 billion a year, all in the control of criminals.

Fighting the war on drugs costs the world’s taxpayers incalculable billions each year. An estimated 10 million people are in prison worldwide for drug-related offences, mostly “little fish” – personal users and small-time dealers.

Corruption amongst law-enforcers and politicians, especially in producer and transit countries, has spread as never before, endangering democracy and civil society.

Stability, security and development are threatened by the fallout from the war on drugs, as are human rights. Tens of thousands of people die in the drug war each year.

The drug-free world so confidently predicted by supporters of the war on drugs is further than ever from attainment. The policies of prohibition create more harms than they prevent. We must seriously consider shifting resources away from criminalising tens of millions of otherwise law abiding citizens, and move towards an approach based on health, harm-reduction, cost-effectiveness and respect for human rights. Evidence consistently shows that these health-based approaches deliver better results than criminalisation.

Improving our drug policies is one of the key policy challenges of our time.

It is time for world leaders to fundamentally review their strategies in response to the drug phenomenon. That is what the Global Commission on Drug Policy, led by four former Presidents, by Kofi Annan and by other world leaders, has bravely done with its ground-breaking Report, first presented in New York in June, and now at the House of Lords on 17 November.

At the root of current policies lies the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. It is time to re-examine this treaty. A document entitled ‘Rewriting the UN Drug Conventions’ has recently been commissioned in order to show how amendments to the conventions could be made which would allow individual countries the freedom to explore drug policies that best suit their domestic needs, rather than seeking to impose the current “one-size-fits-all” solution.

As we cannot eradicate the production, demand or use of drugs, we must find new ways to minimise harms. We should give support to our Governments to explore new policies based on scientific evidence.

Yours faithfully,

Signatories to Public Letter

President Jimmy Carter
Former President of the United States, Nobel Prize winner

President Fernando H. Cardoso
Former President of Brazil


President César Gaviria

Former President of Colombia

President Vicente Fox
Former President of Mexico

President Ruth Dreifuss
Former President of Switzerland

President Lech Wałęsa
Former President of Poland, Nobel Prize winner.

President Aleksander Kwaśniewski
Former President of Poland

George P. Schultz
Former US Secretary of State

Jaswant Singh
Former Minister of Defence, of Finance, and for External Affairs, India

Professor Lord Piot
Former UN Under Secretary-General

Louise Arbour, CC, GOQ
Former UN High-Commissioner for Human Rights

Carel Edwards
Former Head of the EU Commission’s Drug Policy Unit

Javier Solana, KOGF, KCMG
Former EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy

Thorvald Stoltenberg
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs (Norway) and UN High Commissioner for Refugees

Gary Johnson
Republican US Presidential Candidate

Professor Sir Harold Kroto
Chemist, Nobel Prize winner

Dr. Kary Mullis
Chemist, Nobel Prize winner

Professor John Polanyi
Chemist, Nobel Prize winner

Professor Kenneth Arrow
Economist, Nobel Prize winner


Professor Thomas C. Schelling

Economist, Nobel Prize winner

Professor Sir Peter Mansfield
Economist, Nobel Prize winner

Professor Sir Anthony Leggett
Physicist, Nobel Prize winner

Professor Martin L. Perl
Physicist, Nobel Prize winner

Mario Vargas Llosa
Writer, Nobel Prize winner

Wisława Szymborska
Poet, Nobel Prize winner

Professor Sir Ian Gilmore
Former President of the Royal College of Physicians

Professor Robert Lechler
Dean of School of Medicine, KCL

Professor A. C. Grayling
Master of the New College of the Humanities

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta
Professor of Economics at Cambridge

Asma Jahangir
Former UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Execution

Dr. Muhammed Abdul Bari, MBE
Former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain

Professor Noam Chomsky
Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT


Carlos Fuentes

Novelist and essayist

Sir Richard Branson
Entrepreneur and Founder of the Virgin Group

John Whitehead
Chair of the WTC Memorial Foundation

Maria Cattaui
Former Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce

Nicholas Green, QC
Former Chairman of the Bar Council

Professor David Nutt
Former Chair of the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs

Professor Trevor Robbins
Professor of Neuroscience at Cambridge

Professor Niall Ferguson
Professor of History at Harvard University

Professor Peter Singer
Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University


Professor Jonathan Wolff

Professor of Philosophy at UCL

Professor Robin Room
School of Population Health, University of Melbourne

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
Former Editor of The Sunday Telegraph

Dr. Jan Wiarda
Former President of European Police Chiefs


Sting

Musician and actor

Yoko Ono
Musician and artist

Sean Parker
Founding President of Facebook, Director of Spotify

Bernardo Bertolucci
Film Director

Gilberto Gil
Musician, former Minister of Culture, Brazil

John Perry Barlow
Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Tom Lloyd
Former Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire

Bob Ainsworth, MP
Former UK Secretary of State for Defence

Peter Lilley, MP
Former Secretary of State for Social Security

Tom Brake, MP

Dr. Julian Huppert, MP

Caroline Lucas, MP


Paul Flynn
, MP

Dr. Patrick Aeberhard
Former President of Doctors of the World

Lord Mancroft
Chair of the Drug and Alcohol Foundation

General Lord Ramsbotham
Former HM Chief Inspector of Prisons

Lord Rees, OM
Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society

Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss
Director of the Beckley Foundation

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