Unasur will discuss an alternative drug policy in Uruguay

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Bogotá.– The meeting, which will be held next week in Montevideo, was announced by Secretary General and former President of Colombia Ernesto Samper. It will be a preparation for the 2016 UN General Assembly.

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, former Colombian president Ernesto Samper, Infobae reports.

The former president, who has repeatedly defended the need for a new regional approach to drug control, made the announcement on his Twitter account, without giving further details of the content of the event or the agenda of activities.

A source from the General Secretariat told EFE that the aim is to reach a resolution on the issue in time for the UN General Assembly in 2016.

Personally, Samper is in favour of “an alternative policy” that is not based “on legalisation as an alternative to prohibition”, but on “slowly dismantling prohibitionist rules”, he said in an interview with Efe in October.

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

He also called for pursuing crimes and not criminalizing these “weak links in the chain,” as well as applying mechanisms “to help them get out of the problem.”

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

“I feel that there are new global winds that are blowing to review the prohibitionist policy of fighting drugs, which has only produced 300 million consumers,” Samper said 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 succeeds, it would allow a different treatment for it,” which would make it possible to solve “60% of the drug problem in the world.”