At what cost? HIV and human rights consequences of the global “War on Drugs”

While drug control policies have indeed been strengthened in many countries of the world, there is little evidence that they have succeeded in significantly reducing supply of illicit drugs or the numbers of people who use them. Abundantly evident, however—and now acknowledged by the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, as well as virtually every credible independent authority on the subject—is that drug control has had multiple, unintended negative consequences.