For decades, drug policies around the world have been based in the idea that people would be deterred from involvement in the illicit drug market through punitive measures that seek to repress and punish such behavior. This includes criminalizing people for using drugs or possessing drugs to their personal use, for producing drugs, selling drugs, cultivating drugs, carrying drugs across international borders. What we have seen is that these policies are based in a zero tolerance approach towards drug use and the existence of the illicit drug market. So, using these measures is based on the principle that eventually, we will be able to eliminate the illicit drug trade. The extreme edge of these policies has been characterized by what is sometimes referred to as the war on drugs. The war on drugs is a phrase that was coined by President Richard Nixon in 1971. Essentially, in a war on drugs approach, there are policies which again are based on repression, but around very harsh measures that include a strong heavy-handed law enforcement approach, sometimes militarization, military aid, and the justification of foreign intervention on a military basis in other countries. In reality, the war on drugs has been a war on people. Many people who are socially disadvantaged, economically deprived are caught up in these repressive measures. This includes people who use drugs or deal in drugs at a very low level. It includes farmers who are farming crops such as coca, opium, cannabis for subsistence needs, who have their crops forcibly eradicated without any means of replacing their livelihoods. These include people who, out of some kind of economic desperation, end up trafficking drugs across borders. Many of those people end up on death row and then eventually executed particularly in countries like China and in many countries in Southeast Asia. These are the people who are sitting in our prisons. We estimate that one in five people globally is imprisoned for a low-level, nonviolent drug offense. Also, the numbers of women being incarcerated for drug offenses around the world is growing exponentially. In many parts of the world, up to 80 percent of women incarcerated is for low-level, nonviolent drug offense. So, we see that actually this approach really places the heaviest burden on societies, most marginalized individuals, and is it effective? That's really the question. The war on drugs actually has not been able to eliminate or significantly reduce the scale of the global drug market, and instead has resulted in a huge number of human rights violations and associated public health harms such as an HIV epidemic, epidemics of hepatitis C amongst people who inject drugs. The second public health disaster that has resulted from the International Drug Control System is a severe lack of access to important pain relieving medications like morphine, particularly for people in developing countries due to overly strict regulations on such medicines because of a fear that people become addicted to them. But this has resulted in people dying in extreme pain, end-stage cancer patients, HIV patients, or women who need such medicaid sets such pain relief for childbirth. Other results of this overemphasis on law enforcement leads to both policy displacement and resource displacement. So, most of the resources related to what governments want to put towards their drug control efforts don't go into dealing with the health-related the issues and really important life-saving harm reduction measures, but instead go towards law enforcement and criminal justice measures. This has resulted in a huge underfunded health response to the issue of drugs. There is currently very severe lack of funding globally for basic harm reduction measures such as needle and syringe programs, opiate substitution treatment, and this also contributes to the continuing epidemic of HIV amongst people who inject drugs. Between 2010 and 2015, the number of people who inject drugs who were newly infected by HIV increased by 33 percent. This is a huge problem and again another symptom that these measures that are focused on simply reducing the scale of the market, rather than managing the harms associated with drug market, are incredibly problematic. On the issue of human rights violations committed in the name of drug control, again, towards users, Azure such as compulsory detention for people who use drugs, which is widespread across many parts of Asia for example, is a very, very draconian policy. There is very little evidence to show that it works to reduce drug use in particular. We also see even harsher measures such as the use of extrajudicial killings. Currently, in the Philippines, the President Duterte has been inciting the use of extrajudicial killings for anyone deemed to be involved in the drug market. As of April 2017, which is nine months after he came into office, more than 8,000 people are said to have been summarily executed in this way either by police or vigilantes. This really is a very illustrative example of where this idea that we will one day eliminate the global drug trade justifies any means necessary to do so, and really is unacceptable and it's simply not working. There is so much evidence to show that this approach has failed.