Friend takes drugs concern to UN
Nicholas McGeorge takes a statement to UN General Assembly Special Session
A member of Bournemouth Coastal Area Meeting will take a statement to the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the global drug problem.
Nicholas McGeorge will attend the 19-21 April session in New York on behalf of the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC).
The statement, ‘Care, not custody’, stresses that ‘Quakers have been contributing to the discussions on the issue of drug policy reform in the international context for the last twenty years’.
It continues: ‘Quakers consider that drug dependent people need health and social care, not imprisonment. We therefore support the approach advocated by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in their paper “From Coercion to Cohesion”. It calls for governments to provide health-based treatment for illegal drug users instead of punitive criminal justice measures.’
The statement explains that Friends consider drugs policy ‘a human rights issue’.
