The challenge is to have some a common vision with those different affected communities.
In this sense, we can talk about civil society,
civil society teaming up and trying to coordinate to bring a change.
When I see my country Switzerland,
we have many experts,
we have many very brilliant minds.
But what really changed the situation in Switzerland,
was this kind of local coalition with different actors.
Local pharmaceutics, you know they don't want to be harmed by the drug user,
local grandmothers, you know they don't want to see drug use in the street.
Little children playing in the yard,
and so they don't want syringe in the kids place.
So, all these people,
they can gather together and then remind to the policy,
remind to our big leaders, "Hey, come on.
This is a real problem.
We are not talking about like some kind of
a crusade against what kind of a big evil or what.
It's just that products people are consuming them and it brings us problems,
and the policy we have to face,
that bring us problem as well.
So, wake up and try to solve this problem for us."
This local pressure really helped us to implement,
for instance, consumption room.
We did not implement consumption room only for the drug user.
Maybe, we professionals did that for this purpose,
but we did not convince that population for that.
We have to come with another vision,
to integrate all these forces in the society,
and then we develop another story that
the consumption room will bring safety and public order.
Then, it happened.
And it's always very interesting to see at the local level,
in the city level,
it's possible to find agreements on drug policy and almost everywhere,
every city, there is this capability to find pragmatic solution.
But when you climb the scale of the political process,
the region, or national level,
at national level, it's really hard to have a constructive debate,
because we don't talk about the problems,
we talked about ideas, what is drug?
Why people take drugs?
This kind of question, we don't have answers.
If you go to UN, then it's like the fireworks.
All they tell, " we are coming," but nobody
has ever experienced what it really means to live in
a neighborhood really affected by the problem of drug use or drug policies.
So I think the civil society should be more
respected and we should pay attention to what they say.
It's not scientific, it's full of ideology as well.
But at the end,
there are problems that we need to solve.