The War on Pot Is an Abject Failure ... Now's the Time for a New Approach

By Jag Davies, AlterNet. Posted April 22, 2009.

The Commission highlights aspects of international cannabis laws in need of revision and lays out ways in which countries can gain greater autonomy to pursue evidence-based cannabis policies. One way is for individual countries to denounce the international conventions and re-accede with a reservation on cannabis. Another way would be for a group of like-minded countries to negotiate and adopt a new convention specifically pertaining to cannabis -- this option is explored in the Beckley Foundation’s new Draft Framework Convention on Cannabis Control. 

Former President of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who has endorsed the Report, said that, "The Report of the Global Cannabis Commission convened by the Beckley Foundation is a valuable contribution to our thinking on the thorny subject of illicit drugs ... The failure of the 'War on Drugs' strategy is quite evident around the world, but the alternatives are not easy to grasp ... New policies must be based on empirical data, not on ideological assumptions and dogmas." Earlier this year, influenced by the Commission's Report, Cardoso, along with the former Presidents of Mexico and Colombia and 17 delegates from nine Latin American nations, called for a "paradigm shift" in international drug policy that includes the decriminalization of cannabis. The Commission's Report has also been endorsed by Jaswant Singh, leader of the opposition in the Indian Parliament's Upper House, and Jan Wiarda, former chairman of European Police Chiefs. 

Cannabis is the mainstay of the global War on Drugs. The U.N. has estimated that it is used regularly by 166 million people -- 4 percent of the global adult population, compared to 1 percent for all other illegal drugs combined. Under current international norms, anyone who possesses an illegal drug such as cannabis is treated as a serious criminal -- subject to the possibility of arrest, property seizure, imprisonment, denial of access to public benefits (such as financial aid for college or welfare), loss of child custody, and employment discrimination.  

As documented in the Report, there is no evidence that more rigorous enforcement has a significant deterrent effect, although there is extensive evidence that such enforcement causes considerable harms to those arrested and their communities. Nor is there evidence that a less punitive approach to cannabis control leads to any increase in the use of cannabis. Furthermore, although cannabis is more commonly traded within social networks than other illegal drugs, there are still illegal markets worth tens of billions of dollars to organized crime that sustain significant levels of violence in many countries.  

Almost fifty years after the adoption of an unequivocal international prohibition on cannabis in the 1961 Single Convention, we face a very different world. Yet, the U.N. Conventions restrict the ability of signatory countries to adapt to these changed circumstances and adopt more appropriate cannabis policies. They also restrict the accumulation of new evidence to inform the development of new evidence-based systems of control. While in principle these Conventions can be amended, this is not a practical possibility at the present time.  

The alternative, which is explored in the Commission's Draft Framework on Cannabis Control, is to adopt a new convention, which could be modeled on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. This treaty, which was adopted in 2003 and came into force in 2005, was the first to be negotiated under WHO auspices.  

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Jag Davies is U.S. public policy coordinator at theBeckley Foundation.

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