roadmaps to reforming the un drug conventions - Beckley Foundation

also imposes requirements concerning the laws and controls that countries must applydomestically.There are two particular constraints which the treaties impose on countries that haveacceded to the conventions without reservations. First, there are provisions requiringthat use and possession of controlled drugs must be prohibited for other than medicaland scientific purposes, and that possession must be a criminal offence. While the 1961Convention already required that states ‘shall not permit’ the possession of drugs exceptas authorised for medical and scientific purposes, it is the 1988 Convention whichspecifically requires signatory nations to ‘establish [possession] as a criminal offenceunder domestic law’. With the growth of recreational use of controlled substances inaffluent countries in the late 1960s and afterwards, the treaty provisions required thecriminalisation of behaviour that was widespread among young adults. Manygovernments came to see this situation as undesirable and untenable, in earlier yearsparticularly concerning cannabis, and more recently concerning other drugs as well.There have been a wide variety of efforts in different places to step back in one way oranother from the criminal-offence requirement, 19 and a number of discussions of howthe treaty provisions can be interpreted. 20 But the treaty provisions have substantiallyconstrained and structured national and local reform efforts to decriminalise possession.The result often has been compromise provisions which lower penalties but often endup being more widely applied (‘net-widening’, in the parlance of criminologists). Thereforms have generally retained some penalties for possession of small quantities, evenif they are not defined as criminal offences, to stay in conformity with the internationaltreaties. Often these penalties have been easier for police to invoke than the formercriminal offences were, and so have been applied more widely. Then a penalty of a fine,for instance, escalates if it is not paid, and the result is more young people with a policerecord than previously. 21 For this and other reasons, arrests for cannabis possession haverisen in many places in recent years, even where the official policy appears to havebecome more tolerant. 22Second, the treaties require that signatory nations must forbid any domestic market inthe substances, other than for medical or scientific purposes. The provisions forbiddinga domestic market have meant that no nation has a fully-formed system of regulatorycontrol of these substances for any purpose other than for medical use. 2319See Room, R., Fischer, B., Hall, W., Lenton, S. & Reuter, P., Cannabis Policy: Moving beyond Stalemate,pp. pp. 75–106. Oxford, etc.: Oxford University Press and Beckley Foundation, 2010.20E.g., Krajewski, K., ‘How flexible are the United Nations drug conventions?’ International Journal ofDrug Policy 10:329–338, 1999.21E.g., Christie, P. & Ali, R., ‘Offences under the Cannabis Expiation Notice Scheme in SouthAustralia’. Drug and Alcohol Review 19(3):251–256, 2000.22Room et al., 2010, p. 63.23The Dutch system of “coffee shops” for cannabis has de facto legalised a market for small retailtransactions, but there is no provision for legal supply of the coffee shops (see text). The licensedcannabis shops in several Indian states rely for their compliance with international law on a6