Address by the international President/CEO of the Global Grassroot Youth Forum, Rt. Hon. Comrade. Sunday Michael on the occasion of the conference “the road to Vienna 2008-European alternatives in drug policy” holding in the European parliament, Brussels, Belgium between 6th and 7th November 2006.

Your Excellencies, members of the diplomatic corps
Your Excellencies honorable speakers
Your Excellency, Mr. Joep Oomen
Invited guests
Gentlefriends of the press
Honorable ladies and gentlemen

I feel highly honored to have been invited as a representative from Africa to attend this all important epoch making event wish is aim at discussing the alternatives in drug policies and presenting the result therein to the 2008 United Nations convention in Vienna. To me I believe that this is a welcome development hashed in the right direction as it present to us the opportunity of putting our minds together with the best and busy brains towards the realization of a good and effective drug policy that will enhance the wellbeing and prosperity of humankind.

What ever decision we take today if adopted by the world governing body the (United Nations) will determine the future of the human habitat, so I charge and encourage this conference to make good policies and should think about the merits and demerit of such policies before adopting it.

I have looked and studied the programme of this conference and I have discovered that invited speakers are men full of experience and are among the best available hands in the world when it has to do with drug related issues however from my personal research and little experience I will want to make my own modest contributions on “Harm Reduction: policies and principles”


Harm reduction has being defined as a practical strategy that reduces negative consequences of drug use, incorporating a gamut of strategies from safer use, to managed use, to abstinence.

Harm reduction strategies is also meant to meet drug users "where they' are at," addressing conditions of use along with the use itself. The following are the examples of harm reduction: syringe exchanges and safer injection facilities (SESIF), Methadone and heroin assisted treatment (HAT) however I will speak on the one I consider most important for the study of this conference.

Heroin assisted treatment (HAT)
Over the years government and policy makers have being taking actions that suggest that drug reduction treatment is not a priority to them and that what there are interested in is to get more people addicted. check out the following study and research: the Senlis Council, an international drug policy organization based in Europe, issued its controversial recommendations regarding Afghan opium in Sept. 2005. Reuters reported on Sept. 25, 2005 that "Afghanistan, the world's biggest producer of illicit opium and heroin, is not ready to adopt a controversial proposal to use its opium to help ease a global shortage of painkillers, and research shows that licensed Afghan opium production could be used to produce morphine and codeine wish is very important to human treatment. According to reports the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime also rejected the Senlis Council proposal, base on an unacceptable fact that it risked creating confusion among farmers and raising false expectations. Wares there is an estimated worldwide shortage of morphine and codeine at about 10,000 tones of opium equivalent a year, while Afghanistan produces roughly 4,000 tonnes of opium a year. Meanwhile this UN agency that has rejected this proposal conceded that there is a shortage of narcotics for medical purposes, and went further to says that lawful production of opiates worldwide had considerably exceeded global consumption in the past years and could be increased should demand increase." And as it is now the shortage of opiate medicines even hits the nations which currently produce legal opium. The San Jose Mercury News reported on July 15, 2005) that "India is the world's largest producer of legal opium, the raw material for codeine, morphine and other painkillers. But corruption and red tape have left thousands of Indians such as Nevatia to die in agony. And strict licensing hasn't stopped drug gangs from diverting opium meant for medicines to smuggling routes shared by heroin and morphine traffickers, gun-runners and Islamist militants, police say. 'Organized crime and politics join together in this to make life miserable,' said A. Shankar Rao, zonal director of the Narcotics Control Bureau, a national police unit." Dear friends we are not been fair to our selves when we want to solve a problem without first looking for the rut of the problem Mercury News, reported that "Mala Srivastava, the federal official who oversees the licensing system, denied that it had serious flaws. 'Whatever little diversion there is internal,' she said. 'We have never heard of Indian opium, or Indian heroin, traveling abroad.' But the U.S. State Department's annual report on narcotics-control strategy calls India 'a modest but growing producer of heroin for the international market.' In an effort to keep opium out of criminal hands, India's federal and state governments license every step of the process, from growing poppies to stocking and transporting the painkilling drugs they produce. But officials who issue the permits often don't answer the phone, are away from their desks or let applications languish for weeks, doctors and pharmacists complain. Sometimes hospitals run out of morphine while waiting for permit applications to work their way through the bureaucratic labyrinth. 'We have so many patients suffering,' said Dr. Dwarkadas K. Baheti, a pain-management specialist at Bombay Hospital, in India's largest city, Mumbai. 'After two or three months, suddenly we have no morphine left, and for the next month, none is available.'"
The Mercury News noted that "But licensing hasn't stopped traffickers, aided by corrupt officials, from getting opium and other drugs, Rao said. 'With the support of local police and politicians, they convert this opium into 'smack,'' slang for heroin, said Vinod Kumar Shahi, a lawyer in Lucknow, capital of northern India's Uttar Pradesh state. Shahi has learned a lot about the drug trade in 20 years of defending many of the region's top gangsters. By helping traffickers, police can earn 50 times their official monthly salary of about $230, Shahi said. So they pay large bribes to superiors to be posted at police stations in the opium belt of northern India, he said. Tons of tarlike opium gum are skimmed off India's legal supply each year and sent to ad hoc chemists. With a plastic tub, a cup and chemicals easily found on the black market, they make the low-grade heroin base known as 'brown sugar' on the street. There, illegal morphine is worth as much as 25 times what the government pays for it, Rao said. India is a transit country for almost-pure Afghan heroin, which is smuggled in from neighboring Pakistan, often in inflated tire tubes that are floated across rivers along the border. The high-grade heroin produced from Afghan opium accounts for about 87 percent of the world supply, according to the United Nations. Indian drugs also go south to Sri Lanka, where guerrillas with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam use money from heroin trafficking to fund their war for independence. Meanwhile, those who need the painkilling peace that opium-based drugs bring go without." So what are we talking about? When we say “policies and principles” the government and the United Nations most agree to do something that will enhance harm reduction by accepting the recommendation of organizations most especially the outcome of this ENCOD conference on drug policy.

Buprenorphine Treatment
New York's Health Dept. commences a potentially significant promotion of Buprenorphine healing for the city's opiate fanatic. July 2005 New York Newsday reported under the caption "New Option To Wean Off Heroin" that "In an unusual move, city Health Department officials are quietly encouraging physicians, hospitals, methadone clinics and prisons to prescribe the drug buprenorphine to heroin addicts, believing it will lure more addicts into treatment. Buprenorphine - a relatively new drug that goes by the nickname 'bupe' and comes in a pill form - offers a new set of treatment options for opiate abusers, said Dr. Lloyd Sederer, executive deputy commissioner of the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene."
The Health Department's goals are ambitious. According to Newsday, "Despite the potential benefits of buprenorphine, the drug remains virtually unknown and unused by the city's heroin addicts and it remains much unknown to millions of bupe users worldwide. City health officials reported that, only about 1,000 people use it, compared with an estimated 34,000 taking methadone. Sederer and other city health officials want to see a significant change in those numbers. The goal is to have more than 100,000 opiate addicts using buprenorphine for detox maintenance by 2010. 'We are not reaching enough people with the treatments that we have,' Sederer said. 'Not everybody should be on methadone.' Like methadone, buprenorphine is heavily regulated, and may be prescribed only by certified doctors, of which there currently are 345 statewide. In addition, those prescribing the drug are bound by a 30-patient limit; a federal restriction guarding against prescription abuse that Sederer and other health officials hope will be changed so that more patients can be treated. Some private doctors have been reluctant to prescribe the drug, fearing their offices would be inundated with addicts. The drug's pill form would be more attractive to white-collar users trying to avoid methadone clinics, experts said."
It is a well recognized fact that the size of New York City's addicted populace and the present costs of healing are dazzling. Newsday report shows that "The goal, drug treatment experts said, is for more doctors to be able to prescribe buprenorphine and for patients to be able to pick it up at the pharmacy. Potentially, thousands of people could benefit from the drug. The city spends $50 million annually on treatment of an estimated 200,000 heroin addicts and 200,000 others addicted to prescription painkillers like Vicodin, Percocet and OxyContin. The state Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services will spend $313.7 million in 2005-06 to treat those battling against alcohol and other drug-related addictions, spokeswoman Jennifer Farrell said. 'Buprenorphine expands the availability of treatment for those who are addicted to opiates and allows recovering addicts to more likely follow treatment to completion,' Farrell said. Opiate addicts on buprenorphine for maintenance have a better chance of working because it has fewer side effects than methadone, Sederer said. Also, having more opiate addicts in recovery would reduce crime and the spread of HIV and other diseases related to needle use, he said." I think we should adopt this strategies as one of our (ENCOD) recommendation to the 2008 Vienna UN confrence
First North American Clinical Trial of Prescription Heroin Begins In Canada
The first clinical trial of prescription heroin in North America began in Feb. 2005. As the Canadian health ministry, Health Canada, wrote in its news release of Feb. 9, 2005 "The North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI) is a carefully controlled (clinical trial) that will test whether medically prescribed heroin can successfully attract and retain street-heroin users who have not benefited from previous repeated attempts at methadone maintenance and abstinence programs. The NAOMI study will enrol 470 participants at three sites in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. The Toronto and Montreal sites are expected to begin recruitment this spring. Each site will enroll about 157 participants. About half of these volunteers will be assigned to receive pharmaceutical-grade heroin (the experimental group) and half will receive methadone (the control group). The prescribed heroin will be self-administered under careful medical supervision within a specially designed clinic. Those in the heroin group will be treated for 12 months then transitioned, over three months, into either methadone-maintenance therapy or another treatment program. The researchers expect a 6-9 month recruitment period, so that the total time to complete the study will be 21 to 24 months."
"According to Health Canada, "In 1973 the federal Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs recommended that heroin-assisted therapy be tested in clinical trials. More recently, large studies in Switzerland and the Netherlands have indicated that heroin-assisted therapy is useful in helping some chronic users to stabilize their addictions, reduce criminal activity and lead more healthy and productive lives. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is providing at total of $8.1 million and the study is approved by Health Canada. The principal investigator is Dr. Martin Schechter of the University Of British Columbia Faculty Of Medicine. Ethical review boards at each of NAOMI's three sponsoring institutions-the University of British Columbia, Toronto's Centre for Addictions and Mental Health and University of Montréal-have approved the study. 'Results from the European studies suggest that medically prescribed heroin could greatly help our most troubled heroin addicts --those for whom we have no effective treatments,' said Dr. Schechter. 'But we won't know whether the same results hold true in the Canadian setting until we complete this carefully designed scientific study.' 'Heroin addiction afflicts an estimated 60 to 90,000 Canadians and the costs associated with it--in terms of human misery, public health, social problems and crime--are staggering,' said Dr. Alan Bernstein, President of CIHR. 'Canada, and many other countries, therefore, need studies such as NAOMI to investigate new approaches to reducing the harm caused by heroin addiction.'"
Though the plan has some critics, particularly the US Office of National Drug Control Policy (the 'Drug Czar'), many are lining up in support of the NAOMI project. The Globe & Mail reported on Jan. 31, 2005 that "In Vancouver, the plan has the support of top politicians and law enforcers, including the mayor and the police chief. Mayor Larry Campbell, who was once a coroner and drug cop, said the trials are needed because current treatments aren't working for hard-core addicts. 'The critical thing is to accept this as a medical condition,' Mr. Campbell said. 'The side effects of this medical condition is that it forces you to do things that you would never do, be it work as a sex-trade worker, be a B and E [break-and-enter] artist or a purse snatcher. So if I can mitigate that by putting you on heroin, imagine the changes you could have.'" These are policies and principles that could help in harm reduction any where in the world because the present laws and policies by government and policy makers are corrupt and are capable of turning 60% of the world population into drug addicts by the year 2045 and again because many of them (policy makers) are corrupt their policies are creating more harm than good.
I am sure we are aware that Africa and Asia are looking up to Europe and America and because of this the aforementioned problems are now affecting this continents as 35% of the population of Africa now take into smoking cannabis sativa popularly called “Indian hemp” or “Igbo” or “wewe” in Nigeria though in Nigeria the national drug law enforcement agency have tried their best in stopping this act but to no avail because the consumers of this product says since America and Europe are consuming this commodity that there is nothing wrong in them taking it too. So I appeal to you all to make good laws that will


accommodate the right use of this drug.
Than k you all and God bless you in Jesus Name A-men.

02/11/2005.