Strasbourg, 19/06/2006 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday the Parliament adopted on first reading the report by Frieda Brepoels (EPP-ED, Belgium) on the draft regulation on the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) revising the 1993 regulation and providing for a widened role for the Monitoring Centre and its adaptation in the light of the enlarged EU. “A well-functioning drugs monitoring centre is crucial to establishing a coherent national and European Drugs policy,” said Ms Brepoels. She said the “key” to efficiency in this is “reliable and comparable information”, something which only the Monitoring Centre could provide. MEPs gave their general backing to the Commission proposal (see EUROPE 9020) insofar as it took account of the ideas and suggestions put forward by the European Parliament, in particular on its own representation on the EMCDDA Board of Management, the account taken of poly-drug-users, such as the use of combinations of legal and illegal psychoactive substances, and the need for more objective and more comparable data to allow overall monitoring of the drugs situation in Europe. MEPs also stressed that rapid decision making in a transparent organisational framework was a precondition for the efficient collection of information, and that was why they backed the regular assessment of the Centre's activities and those of Reitox (the European network for information on drugs and drug addiction).
200 million people worldwide take drugs, and this number is increasing year on year. In the EU, up to two million people have drug problems, and every year almost 8,000 people die of overdoses.