roadmaps to reforming the un drug conventions - Beckley Foundation

These treaty provisions have substantially constrained the ability of national and localgovernments to experiment with legal or regulatory changes. Even where governmentshave pushed the envelope of compliance, they have felt constrained to do so in such away that they could argue they were still in compliance. Thus the Dutch coffee-shopsystem for cannabis, perhaps the most celebrated example of pushing the envelope, didnot repeal the crime of possession of cannabis, which remains on the books. There wassimply an administrative decision that in specified circumstances the police would notenforce the law. And though there is a de facto legality about retail sales within specifiedlimits in the coffee shop system, the unsolved issue of the Dutch system is the ‘backdoorproblem’: that there is no legal provision for growing and supplying cannabis to thecoffee shops, so that the cannabis which is de facto legalised at the front of the coffee shopmust have come to the shop illegally. 24 This anomaly was built into the Dutch systembecause there was no way for the problem to be solved within the constraints of theinternational treaties. The international treaties, then, have blocked experimentationwith regulated domestic drug markets, and have constrained efforts by governments todecriminalise possession of controlled drugs for personal use.In the proposals in following chapters for revision of the treaties, we have accepted andtaken into account the international interest expressed in the treaties in controllinginternational trade in the substances controlled by the treaties. However, we do notregard an individual’s possession and use of a controlled drug in quantities for personaluse as a matter of substantial interest from the point of view of international trade orsmuggling. Decriminalising personal use and associated actions are the focus of oneseries of options we have laid out in what follows. The revisions suggested under thisseries of options relate only to possession and other acts (including cultivation,production, supply and acquisition) undertaken for non-commercial purposes andinvolving small amounts of drugs. The studies which have been done on the effects ofdecriminalising or recriminalising personal possession, primarily concerning cannabis,have found no general effect of this change on levels of use in the jurisdiction. 25 Thusallowing personal possession in one country seems unlikely in itself to have asubstantial effect in another country.In the second series of options discussed below, creating the possibility for a legal andregulated market in one or more controlled substances within a country, commercialinterests involved in the market may well have an interest in expanding beyond thedistinction in the international treaties concerning which parts of the cannabis plant are underinternational control – see Chapter 3, section 2.2 below.24Korf, D.J., ‘An open front door: the coffee shop phenomenon in the Netherlands’. In: RødnerSznitman, S., Olsson, B. and Room, R., eds., A Cannabis Reader: Global Issues and Local Experiences –Perspectives on Cannabis Controversies, Treatment and Regulation in Europe, vol. 1, pp. 140–154. EMCCDAMonograph No. 8. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2008.http://dare.uva.nl/document/133722 (accessed 8 July, 2012)25Room, R. & Reuter, P., ‘How well do the international drug conventions affect the public health?’The Lancet 379 (Jan. 7):84–91, 2012.7