Helen Clark Independent

Drugs are as much a health issue as a criminal one

By Helen Clark Read the op-ed on Independent.co.uk We should have a world where people understand the risks of drugs through evidence-based prevention and education, not through repression and fear. The UK has announced an overhaul of its approach to illegal drugs. The headlines highlighted the “war on drugs” and

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Helen Clark

George Shultz was among the first to understand drug policy and prohibition

By Helen Clark Read the op-ed on TheHill.com The late George Shultz was among the founding members of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a group of former heads of state and other personalities, which I currently chair. We advocate for an end to the “war on drugs” and its

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Richard Branson

Rethinking drug laws in a new global moment

Read the full blog entry on Virgin.com For the past nine years, I’ve had the privilege of being a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a high-level group of former leaders in government, civil society and business. My fellow Commissioners and I have long argued that the only

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Michel Kazatchkine and Mary Chinery-Hesse in EUObserver: “A fundamental contradiction in EU drug policy”

Read original article in EUObserver By Michel Kazatchkine, former director of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy; and Mary Chinery-Hesse, Chancellor of the university of Ghana and member of the West Africa Commission on Drugs. Over the past

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Our International Perspective On America’s Response To The Opioid Epidemic

Read original article in the Huffington Post A lot has been written about the current crisis of opioid addiction and overdose, which is now the leading cause of death for Americans under 50. Even if this dramatic development affects almost solely North America, there are many parallels to situations that other

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Talking Policy: César Gaviria on the Peace Treaty and Drug Policy in Colombia

César Gaviria [member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy] governed Colombia from 1990-1994, during which time he fought Pablo Escobar’s Medellín drug cartel and oversaw the civil war between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Recently, the Colombian government signed a landmark peace deal with the FARC

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Interview with Commissioner Gaviria: “Die droguenpolitik ist grundverkehrt” (Drug policy is wrong from the ground up)

A new UNO report shows a dramatic increase in the production and consumption of illicit drugs all over the world. César Gaviria from the Global Commission on Drug Policy calls for a new approach. Read original article in German in the NZZ am Sonntag here. Die droguenpolitik ist grundverkehrtDie droguenpolitik

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Commissioners Cattaui, Dreifuss and Grover in Bangkok Post: “Punitive measures do not create a drug-free society”

[Read original article in the Bangkok Post, 14 December 2016.] Achieving a society without drugs has been the objective of many countries around the world for many decades, including Asean with its declaration in 1998 for a drug-free region by 2015. Yet drug use prevalence has, at best, remained stable over

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