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Speech by Dr. Eva Tongue, Chairwoman of the Vienna NGO Committee on Narcotic Drugs
I am honoured and almost speechless, it does not happen to me very often, I would like to express my thanks to you, in The Senlis Council and to all of you who are here tonight sharing with me what I would call a “especial event” because in all my life
I have never worked for acknowledgement, for awards, I worked because I believed in what I am doing and enjoy working.
I had a great partner in my lifetime work, my late husband and we both shared concern for humanity and substances of use in particular.
In a way someone asked me today to give a longer speech and mention some funny stories of my career. And I was thinking very hard, no doubt I can bring up funny stories, but I can only say that when I look back it is more the seriousness with which I approached the various issues and problems throughout four decades which remain in my memory.
I also would like to say, which very few people know, that I am very proud to say that from the 50 Commissions on Narcotic Drugs I have been participant to 36 of them, which probably makes me doyenne of the whole meeting. It was a rich experience to have done that because I can see the evolution and the devolution of international issues per se.
My second pride is that I never worked with governments but I put an awful lot of effort to bring together the non governmental sector and the governments and the non governmental sector of this, the UN system. I always believed in it. The UN is really the conductor of the whole international drug policy scenario and we can make an impact through our own experience on their decisions, when and if appropriate.
We, as an NGO committee, you have heard already so many times this week, had a second NGO forum in 1987 in connection to the International Conference on Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking (ICDAIT) and I am very proud up to date that our forum was able to make recommendations with the assistance of David Turner my colleague – who is here – and we saw working for I won’t tell you how many years – that we managed to push the recommendations which governments accepted, and then graded as a “global comprehensive multidisciplinary approach.”
In other ways, I think my life was very simple as all of us, in the meantime I managed to have a family of 6 children – how I did it, don’t ask me. I just think we should continue and encourage everybody to strengthen the force of NGOs because we are a real force, those who are doing the actual work. Governments cannot do much. They have their own policies but we can influence governments if we are strong enough in unity.
Thank you once again for the honour you have bestowed on me and it gives me strength to continue for a couple of more years.
Thank you.
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