Release's Mission & Vision

Mission

Release is the national centre of expertise on drugs and drugs law – providing free and confidential specialist advice to the public and professionals. Release also campaigns for changes to UK drug policy to bring about a fairer and more compassionate legal framework to manage drug use in our society.

Vision

Release believes that the present regime for the regulation of drugs will be regarded by future generations as one of the great policy disasters of the modern period. These arrangements result in far too many abuses of human rights, fail to protect individual and public health, erode respect for the law, undermine democracy and generate corruption. The War on Drugs is in fact a recipe for a society at war with itself, and this is what we find when we examine the state of global drug control.

Rather than committing ourselves to the fantasy of a drug-free world—something that never has existed and never will—we should educate and regulate to restrict their negative effects. Whether this happens through a reinterpretation and reconfiguration of the present structure, or requires a more radical overhauling of institutional and juridical arrangements, remains to be seen.