Drug Users and Human Rights

To the Editor:

Regarding “An ugly truth in the war on drugs” by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Ruth Dreifuss (Views, March 11): Rather than ignoring the issue, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime is doing everything possible to ensure that drug control does not lead to human rights abuses. In doing so, we are pursuing our primary purpose, which is drug control, in tandem with the three pillars of the United Nations: peace, security and development, and human rights.

The authors of the article have quoted us selectively. They say that while the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime acknowledges that drug users are pushed to the margins of society, we have failed to note that these people’s human rights have been ignored. Not true. The same report quoted in the article also highlighted the human rights of drug users.

Many of my own subsequent statements, including at the ongoing session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna, reiterated the need for drug control to respect human rights. We need to treat drug users as patients, not as criminals, and we will continue to use every opportunity to persuade member states of this need.

Yury Fedotov, Vienna

The writer is executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

(2013-03-12/nytimes)