[MUSIC] Let's talk about the effectiveness of prohibition drug policies. And I'd like to do this by starting to look at the drug market and then looking at the outcomes from drug policy. Then we'll have a look at what opinion leaders are saying around the world. Let's look at the drug market, there's really very little doubt unfortunately that in the last several decades, the drug market has gotten bigger and bigger and more and more dangerous. And that's a general statement. If we break that down a little bit, if we look, for example, at drug production around the world, well, there's no question, drug productions gone up hugely. It wasn't so long ago, 20 or 30 years ago, that a thousand tons of opium was produced illegally around the work, and we're now up to 7000, 8000, 9000. World population's gone up in that time, but it hasn't gone up 7, 8 or 9 times in the last 30 years. So drug production clearly has gone up for opium and for cocaine. Cannabis is hard to measure but probably gone up for cannabis. And then we've got the whole range of synthetics, which we'll come to a little bit in a few minutes. So production's gone up. Consumption's also gone up. Again, it's pretty hard to measure something that's defined as illegal. If we look at the first half of the 20th century, there was only one country in the world that had a significant drug problem. That was the United States of America, and they still have of course a significant drug problem today. In the third quarter of the 20th century, almost every developed country in the world, with the exception of Japan, Standard have report significant drug problems. In the final quarter of the 20th century, we started seeing developing countries apart from Africa, one after one reporting for the first time very serious problems with drug problems. And then in the first quarter of this century, we're seeing Africa, one country after another starting to report serious drug problems. So there's no doubt that consumption of drugs around the world has gone up. The price of drugs like heroin and cocaine has gone down dramatically. It's gone down by about three-quarters, 80% over the last 20 or 30 years. And of course, drug law enforcement is trying to push prices up, not see drug prices fall, so there's more production than there is even demand, which is why the drug prices are falling. Purity is stable or may be even going up. There are a lot of reports where the purity of drugs has been increasing. We also see a much larger number of different types of drugs than we use to see. In the European Union, there are two new psychoactive new substances reported every week, so over 100 every year. So definitely they are more drugs. And unfortunately, there are more different kinds of drugs, and unfortunately, the drugs that are fatal [COUGH] are available today. And often much more dangerous than the drugs that were available 40, 50 or 60 years ago. And where we can measure the availability of drugs, in my country we do that every year. Drug availability has always been high and continues to be very high. 70, 80, 90% of people that use drugs say that getting drugs is easy or very easy. So really however you look at it, it's very clear that drug prohibition has not achieved what it set out to achieve, that is to make drugs scarce, less dangerous, less concentrated and higher priced. It's failed abjectly on all of those regards. Now worrying about the drug market is important, but worrying about the outcomes of drug policy is much more important. And if we look at deaths, disease, crime, corruption, violence, even threats to national security, these have all increased related drugs or related drug prohibition in the last quarter century or more. Another example from Australia, there were six deaths from heroin overdose in Australia in 1964. In 1999, there were 1,116. That's an increase in the rate of drug overdose deaths of 55 times in 30 plus years. So the news is bad about the drug market, but the news is much worse about the things that matter much more to ordinary people, and particularly to parents. Deaths, disease, crime, corruption, violence, all these things are being getting much, much worse. So it's not surprising that opinion leaders around the world are much more vocal about, and much clear about what they regard as the failure of global drug policy. And at first it was only retired politicians and retired police chiefs who were saying these things. Now serving politicians and serving police commissioners and many other people are saying these things. Former secretary generals of the United Nations are saying these things. And we know that the current UN Secretary General when he was prime minister of Portugal organized a major reform of a drug policy in his country in Portugal. So opinion leaders also tell us that something is seriously wrong about drug policy. I'll put to you that there's another way in which our drug policy is fundamentally wrong and that is, let's look at the question of punishment. When the state decides to punish one of its citizens for wrongdoing, that's taken very seriously in countries all around the world. But we've come a long way in many countries in recent years in regarding it as abhorrent, barbaric to punish people with minority sexual preferences assuming there's no harm to a third person and it's all done with consenting adults in private. But there are great parallels with drug use here. If it's wrong to punish people for a minority sexual preference, why isn't it also wrong to punish people for a minority drug preference? Yet that's exactly what we're doing. Again, I'm emphasizing this is in situations where harm is not being done to other people. If harm is being done to other people, of course, that has to be, always be punished. But I think looking at this question of the ethics of drug policy is in many ways just as important, or even more important than the questions of whether our drug policy works or not, or whether there are better ways of managing drugs than the way we're managing it now. Thank you very much. >> So in terms of the predominant approach and whether it's been effective, governments have to ask themselves these questions in a very honest way. At present, there really has been very little honest assessment of the impact of punitive and draconian drug policies. The UN has a goal enshrined in the 2009 Political Declaration and Action Plan on Drugs to have eliminated or at least significantly reduced demand, supply and the global drug market by 2019. So that's two years away. And still they have not identified a very clear review process on how they plan to do this. But they could and they could look at the evidence. For example, the UN office on Drugs and Crime estimates that around 250 million people world wide use drugs. The drug market is as robust as ever. We don't know for sure how much the global drug market is worth, but estimates are somewhere between 300 and 400 billion US dollar per year. In the mean time, we also estimate that government spend around $100 billion per year at least trying to fight this global drug trade. However, the drug market is diversifying. There are new substances coming into the market. These are called new psychoactive substances. And move away a bit from the traditional drugs that we have of cocaine, heroine, and cannabis, and amphetamines. These drugs, we don't know necessarily what the long-term effects of such drugs are for human health. But we know that it is prohibition of the traditional drugs that has led to this diversification. In addition, the market itself is becoming more innovative, with there being increasing numbers of people selling and trading drugs on the dark web, for example, which is much harder for law enforcement to monitor and track. So what has actually been the effect of trying to eliminate the drug market has actually created a host of other sort of unintended consequences, which make the problem even more intractable and harder to manage. And so new solutions will need to be sought because the existing solutions simply aren't working and the current approach has failed. [MUSIC]
