Abstract
The current international prohibitionist approach to the regulation of psychoactive drugs causes serious harms. It creates an illicit market that is responsible for conflict and corruption; denies medication to the world’s poorest; and impedes scientific research into the potential benefits of psychoactive substances. Moreover, it undermines the personal and societal benefit of allowing people to do things that they value, so long as they do not harm others. At the heart of the problem lie the three UN Drug Conventions, which mandate a one-size-fits-all criminalizing approach on all parties. The work of the Beckley Foundation’s Global Cannabis Commission, and a new Beckley Foundation Report on reforming the UN Drug Conventions, spell out how countries—acting alone or, better, in concert with other like-minded nations—could work within the framework of international law in order to implement drug policies that better meet their own special needs and circumstances. Recent initiatives for reform, emanating mostly from the drug-producing and transit countries of Latin America, provide encouraging signs that progress is within our grasp.
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Notes
- 1.
The only countries which are not parties to the 1961 Convention and/or the 1971 Convention are South Sudan (which became a nation only in July 2011 and still has no stable institutions of state), Equatorial Guinea (with a population of well under a million), and a handful of tiny Pacific island nations. Countries outside the 1988 Convention include many of the above, plus the significantly larger countries of Somalia and Papua New Guinea.
- 2.
In 2007, The Beckley Foundation, working in collaboration with University of California, Berkeley, obtained the first approvals in modern times to use LSD with human participants. However, due to unforeseen difficulties involving the principal investigator, the study was not completed.
- 3.
This research was recently featured live on UK television (Murdoch 2012).
- 4.
Typically only about 4–7 % of those aiming to quit smoking are successful. Most medical intervention studies report success rates of around 25 % (source: The American Cancer Society website. Retrieved February 13, 2013 from http://www.cancer.org/healthy/stayawayfromtobacco/guidetoquittingsmoking/guide-to-quitting-smoking-success-rates.
- 5.
The US Classification system takes a similar route, with psychedelics classified as Schedule 1. Drugs in this classification have a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use, and are unsafe for use under medical supervision.
- 6.
For the Home Office list of substances controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act and the Misuse of Drugs Regulations, see http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/alcohol-drugs/drugs/drug-licences/controlled-drugs-list?view=Binary.
- 7.
The UK National Health Service (NHS) reports that over a million hospital admissions each year in England are related to alcohol, with a cost to the NHS of £2.7 billion (at 2006/2007 prices; NHS 2012a). It is estimated that nearly one in five deaths in England of adults over 35 are attributable to smoking (NHS 2012b).
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Feilding, A. (2014). Cannabis and the Psychedelics: Reviewing the UN Drug Conventions. In: Labate, B., Cavnar, C. (eds) Prohibition, Religious Freedom, and Human Rights: Regulating Traditional Drug Use. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40957-8_10
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