There is increasing acknowledgement that punitive prohibition has failed in its stated aims. With that acknowledgement comes the need to consider alternatives and also look at what policies have already served governments in terms of being able to manage the market and reduce some of the harms associated with the market. We know that we need to stop criminalizing people for using drugs because that deters them from accessing lifesaving harm reduction services, drives them away from health and social programs, increases their stigma and discrimination which in turn justifies very harsh law enforcement measures against them, and is wholly counterproductive in terms of cohesive and human rights orientated approach. The rights of subsistence farmers to have a sustainable livelihood is severely undermined when their crops are forcibly eradicated, they're no longer able to support their families, and in addition, the chemicals used in area fumigation in many of those cases, also result in severe environmental degradation. In terms of the criminal justice approach that is used under prohibition has led to very severely disproportionate sentencing frameworks for drug offenses. In many countries around the world are low-level drug offense such as small-scale dealing or trafficking will try to hire prison sentence, then for rape, for aggravated assault or in some cases even murder. As we've discussed elsewhere in this course, prisons really are full of people for low-level nonviolent drug offenses, but this issue of mass incarceration has had very little if no impact on reducing the scale of the illicit market. So, it really is time to look at the evidence and consider what new approaches may be considered. In terms of looking at whether punitive approaches particularly towards people who use drugs have been effective in deterring people from engaging in drug use, there are several studies that can be referred to, that's the WHO, Mental Health Survey from 2008. Also in 2014, the UK government did a study to look at other jurisdictions to see how drug policies impacted on levels of drug use. In both of those studies, the evidence showed that the level of punitiveness in policy responses towards the users of drugs had absolutely no correlation on the level of prevalence of drug use in that given society. In fact, but what does have a correlation is the level of harm, those users faced, if there were no harm reduction services present, or if they were in fact criminalized for their drug use. So, on that basis alone, we can see that criminalization is really something that governments need to reconsider as a failed policy. It's expensive, it doesn't work it's the deterrence mechanism, and it really has a very detrimental impact on people's health. In fact, the incongruence or incoherence between drug control objectives and Public Health and Human Rights objectives is something that we really have to acknowledge now. We have for years pursued to a control policies that have undermined objectives around ensuring people's health, and also ensuring people's human rights globally. In the context of the recent 2016, UNGASS on drugs, where there was of orientation towards acknowledging that the human rights dimension of drug control policies needs to be better adhered to, and also making sure that pursuing drug control policies does not lead to undermining the achievement of the sustainable development goals. These are important global mechanisms that we can use to encourage governments to reconsider the use of repression and punishment in terms of how they manage their drug markets. There is also an economic case to be made for shifting away from these very strong criminal justice approaches. We know that they're expensive, we know that they are wasteful because they really have very little impact, and actually those resources can be reinvested in health and social programs, in harm reduction programs, and it's really time to think about how governments can better allocate their resources across the spectrum of drug control rather than simply putting the lion's share of such resources that they have available towards law enforcement and criminal justice. So, as a minimum in terms of when we're looking at, what policies do work, we think that a red line should be that governments no longer punish or criminalize people for using drugs or possessing drugs for their personal use. At the same time, ensure the scale-up of harm reduction responses for people who use drugs. Whether that's needle and syringe programming, or whether it's for non injecting drug use as well. So, providing drug checking services, festivals, or a nightclub so that people are able to test the content and purity of their drugs as adulterated drugs can be very harmful, it's also about providing say crack pipes, or even beyond that safe consumption rooms or supervised injection facilities. These need to be considered as important approaches. However, there is an increasing discussion about whether the removal of criminal sanctions for drug use or what we often refer to simply as decriminalization really goes far enough. It only really deals with one half of the problem. It is an important half of the problem in terms of as we've discussed the criminalization fuels a great deal of harm for people who use drugs, but ultimately, the entire market probably needs to be managed and decriminalization doesn't do that. So, there are now calls for governments to consider looking at the drug market as a whole, and thinking about how to manage it as a whole and not just removing the punishment for users. This is a discussion that it's based around the idea of legal regulation. At present, the idea of legal regulation has only really been considered in practice around Cannabis. We've seen reforms happening around Cannabis in countries like Uruguay, at the state level in the United States, and also Canada which plans to legally regulate Cannabis in 2018. However in some of these countries, Cannabis really isn't the drug that's causing the most harm. There're issues around increasing numbers of people faithfully overdosing from using street heroin, which is adulterated with a very very strong synthetic opiate called Fentanyl. In the current environment policy and legal environment was it which is quite harmful, where people are criminalized, hiding their use and have limited access to harm reduction measures, the black market means that people will use drugs which they don't know what's in them, what the purity is, and therefore, this actually leads to problems like fatal overdose. So, in these cases, decriminalization and harm reduction may not go far enough. How do we manage the market and how do we ensure that the drugs that people use are safe for consumption given the fact that the policies that have been pursued so far have actually failed to deter so many people from actually engaging in drug use in the first place?