Anderson, Newcastle University It is increasingly recognised that illegal drug policies are in need of reform - they bring considerable collateral damage through criminalization and violence due to vying for market dominance, they impair health, result in large prison populations and weaken governance around the world.1 UNGASS 2016 provides a unique opportunity for opening the door to policy shifts, paving the way for reform of the global drug control regime to permit responsible legal regulation, as is happening with cannabis. There is no one simple pathway for effective reform; it will require experimentation and and error2 and will also require a standard benchmark to address health outcomes across all drugs, legal and illegal. In the field of toxicology, risk assessment for human consumption of a wide range of products is based on margins of exposure (MOE) analysis.3, 4 We propose MOE as the standard tool to drive reform and monitor drug policy worldwide. WHAT IS MOE? MOE measures the of a benchmark or toxic dose (commonly the lowest dose which is 95% certain to cause no more than a 10% incidence of a negative health outcome in animals or humans) to human exposure.4 An MOE of 1 means that the chemical is being consumed at the toxic dose, while an MOE of 100 means that the chemical is being consumed at one hundredth of the toxic dose; the higher the MOE, the lower the risk to human health. Benchmark doses can be estimated from human data such as clinical trials or epidemiological dose-response information, but such information is unavailable for most illegal drugs. For this reason, the currently available estimations rely on toxicity data from animal experiments. Exposure is commonly measured by survey data, or by population-based consumption data. WHAT MOE Threshold?
Anderson, Newcastle University It is increasingly recognised that illegal drug policies are in need of reform - they bring considerable collateral damage through criminalization and violence due to vying for market dominance, they impair health, result in large prison populations and weaken governance around the world.1 UNGASS 2016 provides a unique opportunity for opening the door to policy shifts, paving the way for reform of the global drug control regime to permit responsible legal regulation, as is happening with cannabis. There is no one simple pathway for effective reform; it will require experimentation and and error2 and will also require a standard benchmark to address health outcomes across all drugs, legal and illegal. In the field of toxicology, risk assessment for human consumption of a wide range of products is based on margins of exposure (MOE) analysis.3, 4 We propose MOE as the standard tool to drive reform and monitor drug policy worldwide. WHAT IS MOE? MOE measures the of a benchmark or toxic dose (commonly the lowest dose which is 95% certain to cause no more than a 10% incidence of a negative health outcome in animals or humans) to human exposure.4 An MOE of 1 means that the chemical is being consumed at the toxic dose, while an MOE of 100 means that the chemical is being consumed at one hundredth of the toxic dose; the higher the MOE, the lower the risk to human health. Benchmark doses can be estimated from human data such as clinical trials or epidemiological dose-response information, but such information is unavailable for most illegal drugs. For this reason, the currently available estimations rely on toxicity data from animal experiments. Exposure is commonly measured by survey data, or by population-based consumption data. WHAT MOE Threshold?
UnitedNationsGeneralAssemblySpecialSessiononDrugPolicy23rdSeptember2015EuropeanParliament.docx