Regulation as Global Drug Governance: How New Is the NPS Phenomenon?

Abstract

This work focuses on the lessons of efforts to internationalise prohibitions and regulation over the last century and what these mean for contemporary control efforts around novel psychoactive substances (NPS). In particular it will focus on the system of ‘scheduling’ and how it might be affected by the rapid emergence of NPS. The former was designed as a reactive system of commodity regulation, where the key substances had medical use and therefore required a global trading arranging to minimise the negative externalities from their production and use. It examines the key tenets of the global regulatory system and how they emerged in response to perceived key global issues and the emergence of new narcotic and psychotropic substances. It thereby seeks to determine the continued relevance of the global drug regulatory system to the issue of NPS and how it may evolve in response to the rapid proliferation of these substances. Ultimately, it concludes that the NPS phenomenon will merely accelerate shifts already underway within the system, towards a greater role for national regulatory decisions, an expansion of regulatory experimentation and options and a more general recourse to the principle of ‘policy pluralism’.