Dear participants, we have come to the end of the six-week cycle on drugs,
drug use, drug policy and health.
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to this work, particularly,
Jennifer Hassle Gadrove, Emerick Yare,
and Barbara Boyse here in Geneva.
Thank the milk factory of the [inaudible] center in Paris and thank our sponsors
the [inaudible] in France and the University of Geneva and thank you all for participating.
I hope that the course helped you acquire new knowledge and new materials and
tools on what remains a very much debated issue across the world.
We hope that you have gained insights into how drugs are used as
medicines and how poor access to
these medicines remains for people who need them in most of the world.
How also drugs, psychoactive substances are used non-medically,
intermittently or for longer time periods
by millions of people every day for their effects on the mind.
How for most people that use remains non-problematic but how for others and
for some drugs more specifically their use
becomes harmful through toxicity or dependence.
We hope that we have helped you gain clarity
on the original objectives, the architecture,
and the weaknesses of the International Drug Control System,
realize how Prohibition has generated
a huge international criminal black market that fuels corruption and spreads violence.
How attempts to prevent the use of drugs by
only punitive measures have not worked and how instead they have resulted in
mass incarceration and criminal sanctions and records that for
young people can be a greater threat than to their well-being than occasional drug use.
How repressive policies have directly and indirectly fueled
the spread of HIV, hepatitis, and tuberculosis.
How these epidemics continued to expand in Asia and Eastern Europe
driven by unsafe injection drug use and lack of access to harm reduction measures.
We hope that through the analysis of the negative consequences of
prohibition and positive examples of reform presented and discussed throughout the book,
you'll realize that current drug policies have to be
reformed to ensure that they encourage,
adequate information, prevention, and treatment based on evidence of what works.
We also hope at the end that you will be encouraged to take advantage of
the evaluation tools and of
the more specific materials and the references that we have prepared,
that you will join us and the other participants in web debates and fora in
the coming months and consider yourself contributing to fighting stigma,
discrimination, and false perception about people who use drugs
and wherever you are joining the drug policy reform movement.