An equally important element of future strategies includes enhanced national and international policy emphasis and cooperation on treatment and rehabilitation programs. Expanded linkages are needed between the treatment and law enforcement communities. Take prisons for example. One aim should be to make prisons model treatment and rehabilitation centers. A prison should be a place where you come out drug free, not drug addicted.
Common data is important to identifying common problems and sharing common solutions.
The U.N. or its agencies and individual member nations should take a more active role in promoting the development of standardized data collection and retrieval systems for supply and demand statistics. Today, national and international drug policy decisions are often based on diverse, disparate, and often incompatible national and international data collection systems. We need to fix this tower of Babel. We need to speak the same language. Under the auspices of the United Nations or other regional organizations, a central International Drug Information Clearing House or a series of satellite clearing houses could be established to share successful and unsuccessful experiences to help nations learn from one another in their efforts to reduce both demand and supply.