"The war on drugs has failed utterly because it went from a war on drugs and dealers to a war on drug users," claims Dainius Pūras, the UN special rapporteur on the right to health, who wrote an open letter to Yury Fedotov, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Commenting on the letter to the Human Rights Monitoring Institute, Pūras said that it was necessary to review drugs policies from the ground up as the repressive measures in force, despite their good intentions, have a negative effect on individual and public health.