Mission Statement: the Beckley Foundation Public Letter
The global war on drugs has failed. It is time for a new approach.
We call on Governments and Parliaments to recognise that:
Fifty years after the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was launched, the global war on drugs has failed, and has had many unintended and devastating consequences worldwide.
Use of the major controlled drugs has risen, and supply is cheaper and more available than ever before. The UN conservatively estimates that there are now over 250 million drug users worldwide.
Illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industry in the world, after food and oil, all in the control of criminals. Fighting the war on drugs costs the world’s taxpayers incalculable billions each year. Millions of people are in prison worldwide for drug-related offences, mostly personal users and small-time dealers.
Corruption amongst law-enforcers and politicians, especially in producer and transit countries, has spread as never before, endangering democracy and civil society. Stability, security and development are threatened by the fallout from the war on drugs, as are human rights. Tens of thousands of people die in the drug war each year.
The drug-free world so confidently predicted by supporters of the war on drugs is further than ever from attainment.The policies of prohibition create more harms than they prevent. We must seriously consider shifting resources away from criminalising tens of millions of otherwise law abiding citizens, and move towards an approach based on health, harm-reduction, cost-effectiveness and respect for human rights.
Evidence consistently shows that these health-based approaches deliver better results than criminalisation. Improving our drug policies is one of the key policy challenges of our time. It is time for world leaders to fundamentally review their strategies in response to the drug phenomenon.
At the root of current policies lies the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. It is time to re-examine this treaty, which imposes a “one-size-fits-all” solution, in order to allow individual countries the freedom to explore drug policies that better suit their domestic needs.
As the production, demand and use of drugs cannot be eradicated, new ways must be found to minimise harms, and new policies, based on scientific evidence, must be explored.
Let us break the taboo on debate and reform. The time for action is now.
Yours faithfully,
President Juan Manuel Santos
President of Colombia
President Otto Pérez Molina
President of Guatemala
President César Gaviria
Former President of Colombia
President Lech Wałęsa
Former President of Poland, Nobel Prize winner
President Aleksander Kwaśniewski
Former President of Poland
Sir Richard Branson
Entrepreneur and Founder of the Virgin Group
Bernardo Bertolucci
Oscar-winning Film Director
Carlos Fuentes
Novelist and essayist
Sean Parker
Founding President of Facebook, Director of Spotify
Thorvald Stoltenberg
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs (Norway) and UN High Commissioner for Refugees
Asma Jahangir
Former UN Special Rapporteur on Arbitrary, Extrajudicial and Summary Execution
Louise Arbour, CC, GOQ
Former UN High-Commissioner for Human Rights
Professor Sir Anthony Leggett
Physicist, Nobel Prize winner
Dr. Kary Mullis
Chemist, Nobel Prize winner
Maria Cattaui
Former Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce
Wisława Szymborska
Poet, Nobel Prize winner
Professor Sir Harold Kroto
Chemist, Nobel Prize winner
Professor Sir Harold Kroto
Chemist, Nobel Prize winner
Gilberto Gil
Musician, former Minister of Culture, Brazil
Professor Thomas C. Schelling
Economist, Nobel Prize winner
Professor Sir Peter Mansfield
Economist, Nobel Prize winner
Professor Niall Ferguson
Professor of History at Harvard University
Professor Colin Blakemore
Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and University of Warwick
Professor David Nutt
Former Chair of the Advisory Council for the Misuse of Drugs
Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta
Professor of Economics at Cambridge
Dr. Julian Huppert, MP
Vice-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform
Dr. Muhammed Abdul Bari, MBE
Former Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain
Trudie Styler
Actress and producer
Professor Peter Singer
Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University
Lord Mancroft
Chair of the Drug and Alcohol Foundation
Professor A. C. Grayling
Master of the New College of the Humanities
General Lord Ramsbotham
Former HM Chief Inspector of Prisons
Lord MacDonald, QC
Former Head of the Crown Prosecution Service
Sir Peregrine Worsthorne
Former Editor of The Sunday Telegraph
Tom Brake, MP
Co-chair of the Lib Dem Home Affairs, Justice and Equalities Parliamentary Policy Committee
President Jimmy Carter
Former President of the United States of America
President Fernando H. Cardoso
Former President of Brazil
President Ruth Dreifuss
Former President of Switzerland
President Vincente Fox
Former President of Mexico
Professor Noam Chomsky
Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT
George P. Schultz
Former US Secretary of State
Yoko Ono
Musician and artist
Mario Vargas Llosa
Writer, Nobel Prize winner
Jaswant Singh
Former Minister of Defence, of Finance, and for External Affairs, India
Sting
Musician and actor
Michel Kazatchkine
United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS
John Whitehead
Former US Deputy Secretary of State
John Perry Barlow
Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Javier Solana, KOGF, KCMG
Former EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy
Professor Kenneth Arrow
Economist, Nobel Prize winner
Jeremy Thomas
Film Producer
Professor John Polanyi
Chemist, Nobel Prize winner
Pavel Bém
Former Mayor of Prague
Dr. Jan Wiarda
Former President of European Police Chiefs
Professor Lord Piot
Former UN Under Secretary-General
Professor Martin L. Perl
Physicist, Nobel Prize winner
Lord Rees, OM
Astronomer Royal and former President of the Royal Society
Professor Sir Ian Gilmore
Former President of the Royal College of Physicians
Professor Trevor Robbins
Professor of Neuroscience at Cambridge
Caroline Lucas, MP
Leader of the Green Party and MP for Brighton
Professor Jonathan Wolff
Professor of Philosophy at UCL
Carel Edwards
Former Head of the EU Commission’s Drug Policy Unit
Professor Robin Room
School of Population Health, University of Melbourne
Gary Johnson
Former Republican US Presidential Candidate
Bob Ainsworth, MP
Former UK Secretary of State for Defence
Nicholas Green, QC
Former Chairman of the Bar Council
Peter Lilley, MP
Former Secretary of State for Social Security
Tom Lloyd
Former Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire
Professor Robert Grayling
Dean of School of Medicine, KCL
Paul Flynn, MP
Labour MP for Newport West
Dr. Patrick Aeberhard
Former President of Doctors of the World
Amanda Feilding
Director of the Beckley Foundation
