United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Liaison and Partnership Office (LPO) in Brazil

Watch now the International Symposium on Drugs: from Coercion to Cohesion

Brasília, 11 November 2013 - The videos of all the debates held at the International Symposium on Drugs: From Coercion to Cohesion, which took place from 9 to 11 September in Brasília, are now available in Portuguese on the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) YouTube channel. Various sectors of society participated in the event to promote an exchange of experiences on public policies about drugs.

The organization of the Symposium was guided by the document From coercion to cohesion - Treating drug dependence through health care, not punishment , published by UNODC in 2010.

One of the speakers at the Symposium was the Chief of the Drug Prevention and Health Branch at UNODC and co-author of From coercion to cohesion, Dr. Gilberto Gerra. During his presentation on the first discussion panel, Gerra said that drug policies should be based on health and not on punishment:

Check out the full schedule of the event

The Symposium was promoted by the Ministry of Health, through the Technical Department of Mental Health, Alcohol and Other Drugs (Secretariat for Health Care), the Department of STD, AIDS and Viral Hepatitis (Secretariat of Health Surveillance); by the Ministry of Justice, through the National Secretariat on Drugs Policies (SENAD); by UNODC and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), in partnership with the International Consortium for Drug Policy (IDPC) and the Igarapé Institute.

Related information

Drug policies should be based on health and not on punishment, says UNODC at International Symposium on Drugs (in Portuguese, Spanish and English)

From Coercion to Cohesion - Treating drug dependence through health care, not punishment (in Portuguese, Spanish and English)

All stories