Juan Manuel Santos was president of Colombia from 2010 to 2018, during which time he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to negotiate a peace treaty to resolve the multi-decade conflict with the FARC guerrilla group. He also emerged as the outstanding political leader in Latin America, indeed the world, advocating for far-reaching reform of global drug policy while still in office. We discussed his interactions with Presidents Obama and Trump, as well as other Latin American presidents, during a period when momentum for drug policy reform was greater than ever. I asked President Santos about the evolution in his own thinking about drug policy, and the challenges he confronted in advocating for reforms within his own country. We talked about the impact of marijuana legalization in the United States within Latin America, and the steps he took to advance drug policy reform discussions and policies at the Summit of the Americas and the United Nations. And we discussed current drug policy developments in Colombia, the United States and the broader region.

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