http://www.avaaz.org/fr/june_2011_report/?fp

Victoire sur la "guerre contre la drogue"!

La guerre contre la drogue a coûté des milliards en impôts, a entraîné le transfert de trillions d'euros sur le crime organisé, a coûté d'innombrables vies, et n'a produit aucun résultat.

Pourtant, depuis des décennies, tout débat sur la possibilité de mettre fin à la guerre contre la drogue a été rejeté. Dans les cercles officiels, il est "tabou" de parler de la régulation publique ou de la décriminalisation - certains ont même perdu leur emploi après avoir évoqué le sujet.

Puis un groupe d'anciens présidents ont formé la Commission Mondiale sur les Drogues pour appelé à une réforme ambitieuse. Ils ont fait face à un problème: les politiciens affirmaient ne pouvoir agir car l'opinion publique ne soutiendrait aucun changement! Avaaz a alors rejoint ce combat.

Nous avons lancé la campagne et en une semaine, notre communauté a prouvé que les politiciens avaient tort, plus de 600 000 membres d'Avaaz réclamant la fin de la guerre contre la drogue. Les anciens présidents et le milliardaire Richard Branson ont convoqué une conférence de presse et présenté leur rapport d'experts préconisant une réforme, tout en recevant la pétition d'Avaaz -- et la réaction a été incroyable! Plus de 2 000 articles de presse ont été publiés (AP, IPS, The Guardian), la quasi-totalité d'entre eux étaient favorables !! Le tabou était brisé...

Lors d'une réunion stratégique cet après-midi-là, les anciens présidents n'ont cessé de se tourner vers notre communauté pour que l'on aide à faire progresser la campagne, en soulignant que seule une pression populaire pourrait générer la volonté politique d'agir.

Le lendemain, la Commission mondiale et Avaaz ont rencontré le Secrétaire général de l'ONU, Ban Ki-moon. En 30 minutes de discussion, la pétition d'Avaaz a été présentée et citée à plusieurs reprises comme preuve que l'opinion publique demande la fin de cette guerre. Ban Ki-moon a réagi en indiquant qu'il acceptait cette conclusion et qu'il décidait de créer un groupe de travail qui étudierait de nouvelles solutions pour remédier au problème de la drogue! Un vrai débat, dont nous avions cruellement besoin, a enfin commencé ...

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=55908

Decriminalising Drugs Moves into the Mainstream
By Portia Crowe

NEW YORK, Jun 2, 2011 (IPS) - Several years ago, anyone calling for an end to Washington's "war on drugs" would be considered a heretic. Today, high- level politicians and business people, backed by thousands of regular citizens, are doing just that.

"The idea that there could be a mass public campaign for decriminalisation, because I didn't know anything about the issue, I thought that was a fringe perspective," Ricken Patel, co-founder and executive director of the global web movement Avaaz.org, told IPS.

He presented a global petition calling for an end to the drug war to the Global Commission on Drug Policy Thursday. On Friday, he will meet with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to present him with the same petition.

The Global Commission, whose members include former U.N. chief Kofi Annan, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, and the former presidents of Brazil, Columbia, Mexico, and Switzerland, released a groundbreaking report Thursday calling for a paradigm shift in international drug policy.

"The war on drugs has claimed countless lives, it's cost hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, it's funneling trillions of dollars into organised crime – which poses a profound threat to our governments, to our societies. It's a brutal and senseless war and it needs to stop," Patel told IPS.

In its 2011 report, the Global Commission endorses approaching drug use as a public health problem as well as examining alternatives to the incarceration of drug users, farmers, and petty sellers. But it also recommends more revolutionary approaches like decriminalisation of drug use and the possibility of legal regulation.

"Now is the time to break the taboo on discussion of all drug policy options, including alternatives to drug prohibition," said former Colombian president César Gaviria.

The report also calls on governments to offer health and treatment services to drug users, to increase harm reduction measures like syringe access, and to ensure a variety of treatment methods, including methadone and heroin-assisted treatment.

The world must "respect the human rights of people who use drugs", says the report.

"We need a new approach, one that takes the power out of the hands of organised crime and treats people with addiction problems like patients, not criminals," said Richard Branson, a Global Commission member and founder of the Virgin Group.

"We need our leaders, including business people, looking at alternative, fact-based approaches," he added.

Former Brazilian president Fernando Cardoso said that the commission is not calling for an end to the fight against drugs. "It's not peace instead of war," he clarified, "it's a more intelligent way to fight."

Ruth Dreifuss, the former president of Switzerland and minister of home affairs, highlighted the plight of farmers in the developing world. For many of them, producing poppy seeds and coca leaves is "the only way out of misery".

Currently, the only solution for these farmers is to switch to alternative crops. "But there are not a lot of alternatives," Dreifuss told IPS, adding, "a regulated market for these people would be the best way."

Regulating, rather than criminalising, drug production in the developing world would provide safer environments for farmers, "independent of crime, of Taliban, and so on," Dreifuss said.

Critics of this new position fear that decriminalisation will lead to a rise in drug consumption, but Cardoso and Dreifuss pointed to Europe's success stories.

Portugal was the first European country to decriminalise illicit drug use and possession. According to the Commission's report, that country saw a fall in the use of heroin, which was the government's main concern, and no variation in the use of other drugs compared to the rest of Europe.

In Switzerland, officials have based drug policies on public health instead of criminalisation since the 1980s, and these policies – including controversial heroin substitution programmes – have led to an overall fall in heroin addiction in the country.

"Overwhelming evidence from Europe, Canada, and Australia now demonstrates the human and social benefits both of treating drug addiction as a health rather than criminal justice problem and of reducing reliance on prohibitionist polices," said Dreifuss.

That is why the commission is calling on the United Nations to apply these policies worldwide.

"It's not that we don't want to obey the treaties," Marion Caspers- Merk, former state secretary at the German Federal Ministry of Health, told IPS, referring to the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

"We want to open the debate that our policy has proven better results than the policy we have implemented via the U.N. treaties right now," she said, adding, "We would have a better result with a better policy."

How likely is the commission to succeed in changing the current approach?

"I think it's a good sign that Kofi Annan has joined the group," Caspers-Merk told IPS, noting other high-level commission members like the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, Michel Kazatchkine.

She also cited the World Health Organization. "They support our perspective," she said, "and therefore I think we have a good chance to influence the process."

And the commission has the backing of the nearly 600,000 people from every country in the world that have signed the Avaaz petition online.

"That is important," said Cardoso, noting the international acceptance of the petition. "It's not just America, or Brazil, or Columbia, but all of humanity," he said.

(END)

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/29/drugs-trade-drugs/print

Leading world politicians urge 'paradigm shift' on drugs policy
Kofi Annan, George Shultz and Richard Branson among those urging public health approach

Jamie Doward
The Observer, Sunday 29 May 2011

Former presidents, prime ministers, eminent economists and leading members of the business community will unite behind a call for a shift in global drug policy. The Global Commission on Drug Policy will host a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York to launch a report that describes the drug war as a failure and calls for a "paradigm shift" in approaching the issue.

Those backing the call include Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico; George Papandreou, former prime minister of Greece; César Gaviria, former president of Colombia; Kofi Annan, former UN secretary general; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil; George Shultz, former US secretary of state; Javier Solana, former EU high representative; Virgin tycoon Richard Branson; and Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

The commission will call for drug policy to move from being focused on criminal justice towards a public health approach. The global advocacy organisation Avaaz, which has nine million members, will present a petition in support of the commission's recommendations to UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon.

The commission is the most distinguished group to call for such far-reaching changes in the way society deals with illicit drugs. Danny Kushlick, head of external affairs at Transform, the drug policy foundation that has consultative status with the UN, said current events, such as the cartel-related violence in Mexico, President Barack Obama's comments that it was "perfectly legitimate" to question whether the war on drugs was working, and the wider global economic crisis, had given calls for a comprehensive overhaul of the world's drugs policy a fresh impetus.

Kushlick described this week's conference as hugely significant. "What we have here is the greatest collection thus far of ex-presidents and prime ministers calling very clearly for decriminalisation and experiments with legal regulation," he said. "It will be a watershed moment."

Transform believes the case for overhauling the prohibition approach to drugs is now overwhelming. It quotes Nicholas Green, chairman of the Bar Council, who observed that drug-related crime costs the UK economy around £13bn a year. "Decriminalising personal use can have positive consequences; it can free up huge amounts of police resources, reduce crime and recidivism and improve public health," he said.

But while politicians no longer in office are vocal in calling for a change, incumbents appear less likely to back the idea of any radical shift in policy. In its 2002 review of UK drug policy, the parliamentary home affairs select committee, which included the prime minister, David Cameron, called for the government to "initiate a discussion" into the possibility of legalising and regulating drugs.

Despite the calls successive ministers have declined to endorse them.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011