Count the Costs campaign events in European Capitals

Anniversaries are always good to catalyse drug policy reform activities – and 2011 is very special anniversary. It is the 50th anniversary of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the first international treaty prohibiting (some) drugs. NGOs launched an international campaign to show the world that the war on drugs creates massive costs, resulting from the enforcement-led approach that puts organised crime in control of the trade. We call governments to evaluate the international drug control system. The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) is one of the leading organizations of this campaign. After creating the fictional Drug Lords International (DLI) in March to represent those criminals who benefit from the war on drugs, in June we mobilized our partners in the European Drug Policy Initiative (EDPI) to organize coordinated actions in five European cities - Sofia, Bucharest, Warsaw, Oslo, Porto - to raise public awareness on the costs of the war on drugs.

• Click here to watch a short movie about the Count the Costs campaign.
• Click here to watch a longer video report of the events.

The Hungarian Civil Liberties Union (HCLU) created the European Drug Policy Initiative in 2008 to support drug policy reform activities in specific EU countries. This initiative is not a professional network or lobby group – this is the project of the HCLU that aims to create public advocacy tools, especially videos, to build capacities and skills for NGO partners to use them in a coordinated way to promote evidence-based and human rights oriented drug policies. In the first three years of EDPI, HCLU organised international campaigns with several simultaneous press events in various capitals of the EU, they conducted public opinion surveys, launched video&poster contests, provided scholarships for journalists to produce investigative reports, produced dozens of videos to mobilise people to support domestic changes in legislation or promote harm reduction services.

The EDPI partners who organised the events are:

• APDES, Portugal
• Association for Human Drug Policies, Norway
• Initiative for Health Foundation, Bulgaria
• Polish Drug Policy Network
• Romanian Harm Reduction Network

The presenters of the Count The Cost Campaign in the films are from Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

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