Over the past decade, the Global Commission has worked closely with partners to produce publications which provide a basis of knowledge and evidence-based recommendations.

The Global Commission’s first report (The War on Drugs) broke the taboo on the negative consequences of the so-called “War On Drugs” and called for a paradigm shift: priority must be given to health and safety, allowing for measures that truly help support people and communities. Subsequent reports published in 2012, 2013 and 2015 explored in greater depth how the punitive approach to drugs and the criminalization of people drives the spread of HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and other infectious diseases.  It also contributes to the lack of access to palliative care, pain medication, and other controlled essential medicines.

In 2014, the Global Commission developed five pathways to drug policies that work, providing a roadmap for an essential pragmatic policy change: the consensus on which the international drug control regime was established more than 50 years ago is broken.

The pathways are:

1. Prioritizing public health;
2. Ensuring access to controlled medicines;
3. Decriminalizing personal use and possession;
4. Relying on alternatives to punishment for non-violent, low-level actors in illicit drug markets, and promoting longer-term socio-economic development efforts to offer them a legitimate exit strategy;
5. Regulating the drug markets, and rolling back organized crime and its corruptive and violent influence.

A growing number of national and local authorities are moving away from a prohibitive attitude towards drugs and experimenting with different ways of managing their presence in society. These include decriminalization of people who use drugs, and implementing harm reduction interventions and a large spectrum of therapies (2016); policies based on evidence, not ideology, countering the prejudices about drugs and the people who use them (2017); envision the legal regulation of various substances (2018); the problems posed by substance scheduling (2019); and actual law enforcement by fighting organized crime (2020).