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MARCO WERMAN: President Obama appears to have changed America's stance on a new global strategy to fight illegal drugs. Just a few days ago, UN-sponsored negotiations to craft a new strategy were close to collapse. Europe and the United States were deeply divided, but as The World's Laura Lynch reports, Mr. Obama is now signaling a big shift away from the Bush administration's anti-drug policies.

LAURA LYNCH: If you want to know just how Barack Obama plans to transform the government's drug policies, look outside the United States. To be precise, look to Vienna, where teams of negotiators from around the world are trying to agree on a new international framework for tackling illegal drugs. Until last week, US officials had been pushing hard for anti-drug programs reminiscent of the zero-tolerance stand of former President George W. Bush's so-called war on drugs – and the talks were at an impasse. Drug policy campaigner Danny Kuchlic has been monitoring the negotiations from his home in Britain.

DANNY KUCHLIC: What we're looking for here is a change of tone from the Bush Administration. For eight long years we were under the influence of an administration that was anti-harm reduction; that had a domestic ban effectively on needle exchange in the US, and brought enormous pressure to bear on nation states who were not following that line, who they had control over.

LYNCH: Now, it looks like the tone is changing. Obama has long wanted to repeal the 1988 ban on federal funding for needle exchange programs inside the United States, but he needs Congress to go along to make that domestic change. So he's shifting his gaze outward. In a significant break from both Mr. Bush and Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama is making his support for needle exchange programs official, at least abroad. Today, Laura Tischler of the State Department confirmed the US is giving its negotiators new guidelines.

LAURA TISCHLER: There are certain practices that the United States does not endorse, and there are certain practices that the US does endorse and believe are good approaches for drug abuse prevention, treatment, and care.

LYNCH: So the US will support and endorse needle exchange programs, but that still may not be enough to quiet the critics. They want the American delegation to embrace other methods for helping addicts, including medically supervised sites where addicts can go to inject drugs safely. That and more other controversial practices are part of what's labeled “harm reduction.” Tischler says the US won't buy into that.

TISCHLER: The United States continues to believe that the term “harm reduction” is ambiguous, and it is interpreted by some to include practices that the United States did not wish to endorse or include in either the political declaration or the Annex document.

LYNCH: Danny Kuchlic applauds the shift on needle exchange, but he'd like to see the US go further.

KUCHLIC: In 1998, the slogan for the UN General Assembly special session which set up the last 10-year drug strategy, was “A Drug-Free World: We Can Do It”. Now, while that was rhetoric, that was the ethos. And what those of us who are looking forward to a better world, and one in which lives are saved and people are treated as human beings, and taking a public health approach to drug policy generally are looking for, is some movement.

LYNCH: For the Obama administration, it's likely enough movement. It's now up to other European nations to decide whether his break with the past is sufficient for them to agree on a united front in battling against drugs and drug abuse. For The World, I'm Laura Lynch, in London.

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