Louise Arbour is a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy and a former UN high commissioner for human rights. Helen Clark is chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy and a former prime minister of New Zealand.

Canada pioneered harm reduction in North America with the opening of Vancouver’s Insite, the country’s first legal supervised-consumption site (SCS), in 2003. This was nearly two decades before the first such authorized site opened in the United States. Building on scientific evidence emerging out of European countries such as Switzerland, Canada also introduced the first heroin-assisted treatment programs in North America in 2005. These programs provided a crucial option for people with opioid dependency who were unresponsive to other treatments and medications, such as buprenorphine and methadone…

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