Former Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged on Thursday the start of an international debate on drug legalization, after stating that the policy of the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón is not working.

“When one looks at the results of Mexican president Calderón’s efforts, most will say it did not work. Too many people have been killed. The Drug Policy has to change, and we need to start with a debate and a discussion,” said Annan at the Brookings Institution.

Annan participated last year in the work of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, chaired by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and advocated decriminalization. President Calderon, whose war against organized crime has killed more than 60 thousand Mexicans, recently asked the United Nations General Assembly for an open discussion on the topic.

Annan, who presented his autobiography in Washington, explained: “We have enforced the [drug] laws for decades, filling the prisons with young people whose lives were destroyed by drugs. We have to address this issue through education, health, and not with the brutal reaction”.

Led by the national campaign “Drug Law: It’s Time to Change”, the draft bill principally aiming to decriminalize illicit drug possession and cultivation for personal use was presented last week in the online debate forum, E-Democracia. Since then, the bill’s proposals have provoked a wave of online followers interested in taking part in the discussion. The peak of accesses after being uploaded online was around two thousand hits per day, a level considered “very high” by the manager of the E-Democracia Project for the Brazilian Chamber of Representatives, Alessandra Müller Guerra.

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www.globalcommissionondrugs.org

For Immediate Release:                          Contact: Tony Newman (646)335-5384

May 27, 2011

Former Presidents of Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Switzerland, Prime Minister of Greece, Kofi Annan, George Shultz and Paul Volcker Call for Paradigm Shift in Global Drug Policy

Commission of World Leaders Urges New Approaches to Failed Drug War, Move from Criminal Justice toward Public Health Approach

Live Press Conference and Teleconference on Thursday, June 2 in New York City

The Global Commission on Drug Policy will host a live press conference and teleconference on Thursday, June 2 at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City to launch a new report that describes the drug war as a failure and calls for a paradigm shift in global drug policy.
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Foto: Divulgação.

In my times of Military Police, I thought that the drug users should be reprehended with the same rigidness as the traffickers. By the end of my career, I had my own doubts. Well, even when the governments and police putted some effort (even the Armed Forces were deployed in Rio de Janeiro), nothing ever changed, or else, changed for worst: more drug dealers, more users, more shooting, more kills, more communities subjugated by “commands”, more assaults, more evil gangs in tunnels and express highways. In reality, what we used to do, or better, what we do its not more than a constant “drying of ice”, an expression that I have utilized in a paper that I wrote more than 15 years ago. read more