We’re proud to sign onto the Vienna Declaration, which calls on governments and the UN to end the criminalization of drug users and the disastrous international “war on drugs”. To understand why, read the declaration below — and please add your name to ours.

In English: https://www.viennadeclaration.com/the-declaration.html

中文： https://www.viennadeclarationchinese.com/

The Vienna Declaration

The criminalisation of illicit drug users is fuelling the HIV epidemic and
has resulted in  overwhelmingly negative health and social
consequences. A full policy reorientation is needed.

In response to the health and social harms of illegal drugs, a large international
drug prohibition regime has been developed under the umbrella of the
United Nations.1
Decades of research provide a comprehensive assessment of the impacts
of the global “War on Drugs” and, as thousands of individuals gather in
Vienna at the XVIII International AIDS Conference, the international
scientific community calls for an acknowledgement of the limits and
harms of drug prohibition, and for drug policy reform to remove barriers
to effective HIV prevention, treatment and care.

The evidence that law enforcement has failed to prevent the availability of illegal
drugs, in communities where there is demand, is now unambiguous.2, 3Over the last
several decades, national and international drug surveillance systems
have demonstrated a general pattern of falling drug prices and
increasing drug purity–despite massive investments in drug law
enforcement.3,4

Furthermore, there is no evidence that increasing the ferocity of law enforcement
meaningfully reduces the prevalence of drug use.5 The data also clearly demonstrate
that the number of countries in which people inject illegal drugs is
growing, with women and children becoming increasingly affected.6 Outside of
sub-Saharan Africa, injection drug use accounts for approximately one in
three new cases of HIV.7, 8 In some areas where HIV is spreading most rapidly, such as Eastern
Europe and Central Asia, HIV prevalence can be as high as 70% among
people who inject drugs, and in some areas more than 80% of all HIV
cases are among this group.8

In the context of overwhelming evidence that drug law
enforcement has failed to achieve its stated objectives, it is important
that its harmful consequences be acknowledged and addressed. These
consequences include but are not limited to:

• HIV epidemics fuelled by the criminalisation of people who use illicit drugs
  and by prohibitions on the provision of sterile needles and opioid
  substitution treatment.9, 10
• HIV outbreaks among incarcerated and institutionalised drug
  users as a result of punitive laws and policies and a lack of HIV
  prevention services in these settings.11-13
• The undermining of public health systems when law enforcement drives drug users away from
  prevention and care services and into environments where the risk of
  infectious disease transmission (e.g., HIV, hepatitis C & B, and
  tuberculosis) and other harms is increased.14-16
• A crisis in criminal justice systems as a result of record incarceration rates in a number of
  nations.17, 18This has negatively affected the social functioning of entire
  communities. While racial disparities in incarceration rates for drug
  offences are evident in countries all over the world, the impact has
  been particularly severe in the US, where approximately one in nine
  African-American males in the age group 20 to 34 is incarcerated on any
  given day, primarily as a result of drug law enforcement.19
• Stigmatowards people who use illicit drugs, which reinforces the political
  popularity of criminalising drug users and undermines HIV prevention and
  other health promotion efforts.20,
  21
• Severe human rights violations, including
  torture, forced labour, inhuman and degrading treatment, and execution
  of drug offenders in a number of countries.22, 23
• A massive illicit
  market worth an estimated annual value of US$320 billion.4 These profits
  remain entirely outside the control of government. They fuel crime,
  violence and corruption in countless urban communities and have
  destabilised entire countries, such as Colombia, Mexico and Afghanistan.4
• Billions of tax dollars wasted on a “War on Drugs” approach to drug control that
  does not achieve its stated objectives and, instead, directly or
  indirectly contributes to the above harms.24

Unfortunately, evidence of the failure of drug prohibition to achieve its stated goals,
as well as the severe negative consequences of these policies, is often
denied by those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.25This has created
confusion among the public and has cost countless lives. Governments
and international organisations have ethical and legal obligations to
respond to this crisis and must seek to enact alternative evidence-based
strategies that can effectively reduce the harms of drugs without
creating harms of their own. We, the undersigned, call on governments
and international organisations, including the United Nations, to:

• Undertake a transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies.
• Implement and evaluate a science-based public health approach to address the
  individual and community harms stemming from illicit drug use.
• Decriminalise drug users, scale up evidence-based drug dependence treatment options
  and abolish ineffective compulsory drug treatment centres that violate
  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.26
• Unequivocally endorse and scale up funding for the implementation of the comprehensive package
  of HIV interventions spelled out in the WHO, UNODC and UNAIDS Target
  Setting Guide.27
• Meaningfully involve members of the affected community in developing, monitoring and
  implementing services and policies that affect their lives.

We further call upon the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, to urgently
implement measures to ensure that the United Nations system–including
the International Narcotics Control Board–speaks with one voice to
support the decriminalisation of drug users and the implementation of
evidence-based approaches to drug control.28

Basing drug policies on scientific evidence will not eliminate drug use or the problems stemming
from drug injecting. However, reorienting drug policies towards
evidence-based approaches that respect, protect and fulfil human rights
has the potential to reduce harms deriving from current policies and
would allow for the redirection of the vast financial resources towards
where they are needed most: implementing and evaluating evidence-based
prevention, regulatory, treatment and harm reduction interventions.