Ambassador Roberta Lajous.

• Position: The Chronicle Interview - Includes related article - Mexico's Ambassador to Vienna - Interview

Why has Mexico taken such an active role in the General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem?

It was a Mexican initiative and one we are very proud of. The real trigger came during the presidential campaign of Ernesto Zedillo, who grasped just how big a problem drugs were becoming for Mexico and for the world. So he began in his foreign policy speeches to stress the need to convene a world conference on illicit drugs. That was in mid-1994. Then he was elected and took office on 1 December that year. Well, the first thing he had to face was Mexico's financial crisis - something which fortunately is now behind us.

As soon as the crisis settled, in 1995, the Mexican Foreign Ministry set about working towards arranging a summit on drugs. Unfortunately, by then, several important summits had already been organized by the United Nations, starting with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. That was followed by others, including the Human Rights Conference in Vienna in 1993, the Population Conference in Cairo in 1994, and in 1995 the Conference on Women in Beijing and the Social Summit in Copenhagen. So, by the end of 1995, the world, and particularly the United States, was experiencing a kind of "summit fatigue". The general feeling was that it was not a very convenient time to call for another global summit-level meeting. Perhaps expectations had been raised too high. Still, Mexico remained convinced that we had to work towards a conference of world leaders, aimed mainly at the promotion of better understanding and wider cooperation in the fight against drugs.

With regards to better understanding and cooperation, and you're talking on a global level, what is the general hope of what will be coming out of the Special Session in June?

First of all, a greater awareness of the drug problem. Unfortunately, the problem has grown at a fantastic rate over the last ten years since the last international attempt here in Vienna to summarize and bring together under one convention different legal instruments designed to fight illicit drugs and prevent their spread. It's striking to see how fast drug abuse has spread to new countries, to new population groups. Also, new drugs have been developed since 1988, especially in the class of"synthetic drugs" that were just making their appearance ten years ago. So, really, what we have now is a new and different situation, but we don't have enough information on it.

I would say the first task of the Special Session would be to build better awareness of the problem and to gather better...