Details for ALICE RAP Position paper on Margin of Exposure (for European Parliament)

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.

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 trial and error 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. We propose MOE as the standard tool to drive reform and monitor drug policy worldwide.