Unasur will address an alternative drug policy in Uruguay

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Bogota.– The meeting, which will be held next week in Montevideo, was announced by the secretary general and former president of Colombia Ernesto Samper. It will be a preparation for the UN general assembly 2016

The Union of South American Nations (Unasur) will hold a meeting next week in Montevideo (Uruguay) to discuss an “alternative drug policy,” announced this Monday the secretary general of that organization, the former president of Colombia Ernesto Samper, reports Infobae.

The former president, who has repeatedly defended the need to apply a new regional approach to drugs, made the announcement on his Twitter social network account, without giving more details regarding the content of the event or the agenda of activities.

A source from the general secretariat told the EFE agency that the aim is to reach a proposal on the issue for the 2016 UN general assembly.

On a personal note, Samper is in favor of “an alternative policy” that is not based “on legalization as an alternative to prohibition,” but on “slowly dismantling prohibitionist norms,” ​​as he said in an interview with Efe in October.

“Today we are tough with the farmers, we are tough with the ‘mules’ that transport (drugs), we are tough with the consumers and we are weak with the criminal organizations,” he declared.

And he advocated prosecuting crime and not criminalizing those “weak links in the chain”, as well as applying mechanisms “to help them get out of the problem.”

Uruguay, which will be the scene of the meeting, legalized the sale and domestic production of marijuana, which was praised as a “brave” path in the fight once morest drug trafficking by Samper himself during a visit to Montevideo also in October.

“I feel that there are new global winds to review the prohibitionist policy to combat drugs, which has only given 300 million consumers,” Samper stated at the time.

The former president of Colombia (1994-1998) considered on that occasion that “sooner or later the world will have to separate marijuana from the rest of the drugs. If it achieves this, it would allow a different treatment for it”, which will make it possible to solve “60% of the drug problem in the world.”