roadmaps to reforming the un drug conventions - Beckley Foundation

and their effort was rejected by a successor committee in 1964. 74 In the currentintellectual ferment on the relative dangerousness of drugs, 75 no-one argues that thepresent arrangements are justified on the grounds of relative addictiveness and impacton public health.So it is time for a new Single Convention which pulls together into a single internationalcontrol regime the major psychoactive substances. Such a Convention would, on the onehand, strengthen the rather weak provisions of the Framework Convention on tobacco,and institute an international control regime on alcohol, while on the other handeliminating the overreaching provisions of the current international drug controltreaties.2. The issue of auspices 76New treaties are usually negotiated by a Conference of Parties assembled for thatspecific purpose. There is no necessity in international law for the negotiations to behosted by any particular entity. It was in response to a US invitation, for instance, thatconferences were convened and the original Hague Opium Convention was negotiated.Given the controversy which would be likely to surround the effort to negotiate a newSingle Convention, the simplest path forward might well be to proceed with anegotiating conference convened by this older path of invitation from one or moreinterested nations.However, in recent years it has been common practice to negotiate such agreementsunder the auspices of an intergovernmental agency. In the United Nations system, theinternational drug conventions are under the auspices of the Commission on NarcoticDrugs, which reports to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). An obviousalternative would be to take the precedent of the FCTC, which was negotiated at the callof the World Health Assembly and under the auspices of the World HealthOrganisation. 77 There is a strong case for putting public health at the heart of the newconvention, and this would argue for WHO auspices. Another international conventionwhich involves psychoactive substances, the International Convention against Doping inSport 2005, 78 was negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations Education,74Room, R. Alcohol and drug disorders in the International Classification of Diseases: a shiftingkaleidoscope, Drug and Alcohol Review 17:305−17, 1998.75E.g., Caulkins, J.P., Reuter, P., Coulson, C. ‘Basing drug scheduling decisions on scientific ranking ofharmfulness: false promise from false premises; with comments and a response’, Addiction106(11):1886−98, 2011.76This section draws on pp. 140−1 in: Room, R., Fischer, B., Hall, W., Lenton, S. & Reuter, P. CannabisPolicy: Moving beyond Stalemate. Oxford: Beckley Foundation Press and Oxford University Press, 2010,which considered potential auspices for a new Framework Convention on Cannabis Control.77Room, 2006.78http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=31037&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html (accessed 2 July, 2012).28