SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you very much. (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you.
It is genuinely an honor to join all of you as the first American secretary of state to participate in the high-level session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. And I am joined today by the most senior delegation the United States Government has ever sent to this gathering. Agencies, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Justice, Drug Policy, Drug Enforcement, everyone is here, and it, simply put, reflects the importance that President Biden places on addressing the shared challenge of synthetic drugs and the whole-of-government approach that we brought to meeting the challenge.
We've come to Vienna to continue to sound the alarm - to sound the alarm around the dangers of synthetic drugs and to rally a more coordinated and vigorous global response, and here's why. First, every region is experiencing a dramatic increase in synthetic drug use, addiction, and overdose deaths, from tramadol in Africa, to fake Captagon pills in the Middle East, to ketamine and amphetamine in Asia.
Now these are far from the only harms. Criminal organizations that manufacture and traffic synthetic drugs are also extorting local businesses, corrupting politicians, security forces, trafficking women and children. Second, this is a problem that no one country can effectively solve alone. In an interconnected world, criminal organizations quickly exploit weak links to make, to move, and to market their increasingly potent and dangerous synthetic drugs. Chemical precursors manufactured in one country transit through others, get to a third where they're synthesized, and then come into the United States or other countries, hitting our streets, killing our people. So we have to work together to get at every link in this chain.
Finally, no country, no government, no institution has a monopoly on good ideas. Innovative solutions are being tried, they're being tested everywhere, and the more we can bring these ideas together, the more effective each of us is going to be. So we have to do more to learn from one another and work with one another. And that's the focus of today's gathering.
The good news is we already have so many of the tools that we need to tackle this challenge thanks to decades of work by leaders in government, in multilateral organizations, in civil society, including right here at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, which has the authority to place synthetic drugs and their precursors under international control. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, also based here in Vienna, has worked with experts around the globe to develop a synthetic drug strategy and practical toolkits for action. The International Narcotics Control Board has created platforms that allow governments, law enforcement, justice officials around the world to exchange information in real time about legitimate chemical and pharmaceutical shipments as well as suspected trafficking incidents.
We've also created new tools to foster greater global awareness and cooperation on this issue. Last July, we launched the Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats. We started with about 80 partner countries. It's now grown to 151 countries, 14 international organizations and counting. From the outset, the coalition is focused on three main lines of effort: preventing the illicit manufacture and trafficking of synthetic drugs and precursors, detecting emerging trends and threats, promoting public health solutions. In the short space of time since July when the coalition came together, we've held 70 working group sessions with more than 1,500 participants, including public health experts, law enforcement officers, diplomats, civil society leaders. In all, the working sessions generated more than 120 proposals for programs, for policies, for actions, nearly all of them now searchable on the coalition's website.
