European NGO’S campaign for legal regulation of drugs

On Sunday 21 March 2004, the European NGO Council on Drug Policy (ENCOD), a platform of 73 Non-Governmental Organisations from 22 European countries, will launch a "springtime campaign for the legal regulation of drugs". The platform, representing tens of thousands of citizens affected or concerned by the drug issue, calls prohibition of drugs an insult to human dignity and a terrible waste of ressources. Legal regulation is the only clever way to reduce drugs-related problems for public health and community safety, the NGOs say.

The campaign is adressed to European governments and the United Nations, who have failed to respond to increasing claims from civil society and experts to reform the existing UN Conventions on Drugs, the basis of drug legislation in almost every country in the world.

According to ENCOD, the reform of the Conventions is necessary to allow national and regional authorities to implement drug policies that specifically fit to their needs and traditions, without being obliged to use prohibition as the basic element of this policy.

"In the drug debate", says ENCOD, "essential democratic values are at stake. While national governments and UN bureaucrats are spending billions of tax money to fight a useless struggle that only benefits organised crime, citizens are told to shut up and co-operate. Meanwhile, authorities of cities and regions throughout Europe now know enough about drugs to understand that persecution of people worsens the problems. Years ago, they embraced the principle of harm reduction, establishing needle exchange, consumption rooms, controlled distribution of heroin and a permissive policy towards the use and sale of cannabis. But they also found out that, as long as national drug policies are tied to the UN Conventions that prescribe prohibition, it is impossible to reduce the most important cause of drug-related harm, the fact that they are illegal."

In the past days the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs met in Vienna to discuss the ongoing results of a strategy agreed upon in 1998, which is aiming towards the complete elimination of drug production and consumption in 2008. Although UN’s own figures show that since 1998, production and consumption of drugs have been increasing on a global scale, and the strategy is having serious negative consequences for the lives of millions of people, the CND meeting is expected to conclude that it should continue unchallenged.

In response, ENCOD calls on European citizens to plant cannabis, coca and opium plants in public places as a way to demonstrate their disagreement with the UN strategy and to express themselves in support of just and effective drug policies.

Besides, ENCOD will present its proposals for a legal regulation of the drugs market in several occasions, among others during the European Economic Forum in Warsaw, Poland (For more information, see: http://hyperreal.info/wiki/go.to/see/AES )

On May 1st and 8th, there will be marches for the legalization of cannabis throughout Europe. And on 26 June, ENCOD will organise its General Assembly in Copenhagen, Denmark.