The Beckley Foundation’s Side Event at CND 2016: Amanda Feilding’s Introduction

Today, a selection of contributors to our forthcoming report, “Roadmaps to Regulation: Coca, Cocaine & Derivatives” are presenting their insights, at our official side event to the CND, at 1.10 in Conference Room M4. Here is Amanda Feilding’s opening address:

Hello,

I’m Amanda Feilding, Founder and Director of the Beckley Foundation. I have been involved in creating a scientific evidence base for global drug policy since 1998.

In 2012, I was invited to advise President Molina of Guatemala and his government on drug policy reform.

I was amazed to find that although the illegal market for coca, cocaine, and derivatives is a major factor underlying the creation of devastating harms around the world, in particular in producer and transit countries, there has been little or no research on how one might approach the legal regulation of the different stages of the chain – particularly the legal regulation of the end product: cocaine in the consumer countries of the world, dominated by the US and Europe.

I suggested to President Molina and his Foreign Minister, Fernando Carrera, that I convene a report by the world’s leading experts to address this, and hopefully open up the debate on how one could best approach these difficult issues. I thought this report could do for cocaine what the previous Beckley report “Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate” had done for cannabis 6 years earlier.

It has been a difficult report because of its scope, and also because in the academic world there has been an absence of studies into how one might approach the legal regulation of cocaine and its derivatives. The subject is strangely taboo.

However, for this report we have now gathered 25 experts from around the world, of whom four are here today.

I would like to introduce you to: David Bewley-Taylor, Thomas Grisaffi, Gabriele Fischer, and Carla Rossi.

Thank you all for coming here. Each of the speakers will speak for 5-10 minutes, and be followed by a Q&A.