Advancing the War on Drugs.

• Author: Conoway, Janelle
• Position: Brief Article

Drug "czars" from around the hemisphere met in Washington, D.C., in late January to continue developing a set of indicators that will help evaluate progress in the war against illegal drugs.

Acting on a mandate from last year's Summit of the Americas, the OAS Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) is working to create a tool that will provide reliable feedback on how effectively the region and individual countries are meeting anti-drug goals. The so-called Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism will look at a wide range of indicators related to drug production, delivery, and consumption.

The working group developing the evaluation mechanism has met four times, under the leadership of Canadian deputy solicitor general Jean Fournier and Pablo Lagos Puccio, who heads Chile's National Council for the Control of Narcotics (CONACE). Fournier says the multilateral approach to evaluating progress on...