Policy analysis
Regime change: Re-visiting the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2011.08.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Background

March 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This legal instrument, the bedrock of the current United Nations based global drug control regime, is often viewed as merely a consolidating treaty bringing together the multilateral drug control agreements that preceded it; an erroneous position that does little to provide historical context for contemporary discussions surrounding revision of the international treaty system.

Method

This article applies both historical and international relations perspectives to revisit the development of the Convention. Framing discussion within the context of regime theory, a critique of the foundational pre-1961 treaties is followed by detailed content analysis of the official records of the United Nations conference for the adoption of a Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and, mindful of later treaties, an examination of the treaty's status as a ‘single’ convention.

Results

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs represents a significant break with the regulative focus of the preceding multilateral treaties; a shift towards a more prohibitive outlook that within international relations terms can be regarded as a change of regime rather than the straightforward codification of earlier instruments. In this respect, the article highlights the abolition of drug use that for centuries had been embedded in the social, cultural and religious traditions of many non-Western states. Further, although often-overlooked, the Convention has failed in its aim of being the ‘single’ instrument within international drug control. The supplementing treaties developed in later years and under different socio-economic and political circumstances have resulted in significant inconsistencies within the control regime.

Conclusion

Having established that a shift in normative focus has taken place in the past, the article concludes that it is timely for the international community to revisit the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs with a view to correcting past errors and inconsistencies within the regime, particularly those relating to Scheduling and traditional drug use.

Introduction

The year 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs; the bedrock of the current international drug control regime comprising this convention as amended by the 1972 Protocol, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and the 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. When discussing this multilateral treaty system, there is a tendency to talk of its history and evolution in terms of smooth continuum connecting events in the first decade of the twentieth century to the present day; an unbroken arc of progress incorporating both soft and hard law instruments alike. Within this descriptive framework, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (hereafter sometimes referred to as the Single Convention) plays a key role in linking multilateral drug control agreements made before and during the lifetime of the League of Nations to the structures operating under the auspices of the United Nations (UN). Among its original aims, it is generally the Convention's consolidating or unifying role that, mindful of its title, understandably retains a central place within the dominant historiography. There is a certain utility or functionality to be gained from this perspective. For instance it is useful when constructing a narrative of successful ‘containment’ of the so-called ‘world drug problem’ over the course of a century of international drug control (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2008). Or, from an international relations viewpoint, the Convention can be seen neatly as one in a succession of treaties comprising what has usefully been called the ‘Global Drug Prohibition Regime’ (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006, pp. 37–46). From a different angle, however, the perspective provides a particularly useful point of entry when revisiting the formulation and operation of the Single Convention.

Indeed, when looking at the UN drug control framework as an example of an international regime, that is to say a set of ‘implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner, 1982, p. 186), the Single Convention represents what should be regarded as a ‘watershed’ event. As we shall see, its passage represented a moment when the multilateral framework shifted away from regulation and introduced a more prohibitive ethos to the issue of drug control. While some have alluded to this idea (Carstairs, 2005, p. 61; Paoli, Greenfield, & Reuter, 2009, pp. 249–250; Buxton, 2010, p. 85), it is useful to employ an international relations perspective to unpack further the notion of ‘change.’ This is especially the case in light of discussions about moving beyond current changes within the prohibition-oriented regime to changes of the regime. Within this context, changes within the regime represent a process of weakening and normative attrition whereby many Parties to the conventions have engaged in soft defection from its ‘prohibitive expectancy’ (Bewley-Taylor, 2009, pp. 7–11). This has involved both the adoption of a range of harm reduction interventions relating to intravenous drug use and liberalizing policy trends in relation to the possession of controlled drugs, particularly cannabis, for personal use. While such policy choices take place within the confines of the extant treaty framework by means of its interpretative flexibility, changes of the regime involve a substantive alteration in normative focus via a formal treaty amendment or modification. As such, recent moves by the Plurinational State of Bolivia to lift the international ban on coca chewing via an amendment to the Single Convention represented the first truly open attempt to institute a change of the contemporary regime. It was also a move that triggered intense opposition from states with an underlying concern for the ‘integrity’ of the convention (Jelsma, 2011).

With all this in mind, this article has three principal and mutually reinforcing aims. First, in revisiting the place of the Single Convention within the historiographic account of international drug control it hopes to highlight the fact that, far from being the result of a century of uninterrupted normative development, the international drug control system has in the past experienced a substantive change in focus. This reality not only marks Bolivia's endeavours as a natural part of an evolutionary process rather than a heretical act, but also suggests that a significant future change of the regime is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Second, through an in-depth discussion of debates at the conference for its adoption, the article reveals how the Convention's final form deals with plant based substances, cultivation and traditional drug use as it does. Third, it explores how, as a result of the many compromises made in 1961, the ‘Single’ Convention retained a legitimate claim upon that title for only seven years after coming into force. Indeed, it is argued that the resultant inconsistencies between the instrument and those that followed, the issue of coca prominent among them, provide a powerful rationale for the international community to revisit the Single Convention and revise some aspects of the current regime that is based upon it.

Section snippets

The foundational pre-1961 treaties

In strictly technical terms, the lineage of the modern international drug control regime of which the Single Convention remains core dates back to The Hague in 1912. The International Opium Convention, the first of a series of legally binding multilateral agreements on the issue, was however a ‘step further on the road’ (Preamble, International Opium Convention, 1912) opened by the US initiated International Opium Commission three years earlier. Then, driven by a complex mix of moral,

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs

Work on some form of ‘single’ or ‘unified’ treaty had begun in 1948 when the recently formed ECOSOC approved a US drafted and sponsored resolution from the equally youthful CND (King, 1974, pp. 218–219; McAllister, 2000, p. 72). Owing much to Anslinger's endeavours, this requested the UN Secretary General to prepare a draft convention to replace the full list of existing treaties that had been agreed since The Hague Convention of 1912. The treaty was to have three core objectives; to limit the

Plants, cultivation and traditional use

The new-found proscriptive tenor is also abundantly evident in article 49; a section of the Convention that in many ways revealed more than other parts the prohibitive expectations of its authors. The Single Convention introduced for the first time the explicit objective to end all ‘quasi-medical’ and traditional uses of three plants. While ‘not prohibited under the treaties in force’ at the time of the conference for the adoption of the Convention in 1961 (E/3527, p. 3), the widespread

A ‘Single’ convention?

Despite being widely lauded as a positive ‘step forward’ (E/CONF.34/24, p. 217 and 218) there was considerable dissatisfaction on the US side about the outcomes of the 1961 Conference. As Herbert May wrote in a private letter to Anslinger in July 1962, “I know that the US is not satisfied with the Convention…But an international convention is a compromise: it practically never gives everyone all that it wants” (May, 1962). Less content to accept compromise than other nations the US,

Conclusions

Considered by many at the 1961 conference as a ‘landmark in the history of the campaign against narcotic drugs’ (see for example E/CONF.34/24, p. 218) the Single Convention was indeed far more than a mere consolidating exercise bringing together most of the treaties that preceded it. It was ‘greater than the sum of the parts it replaced’ (Gregg, 1961, p. 188). Nor was it simply another step along the same road began in Shanghai in 1909 or, as sometimes presented, an example of the ‘historic

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article appeared as Fifty Years of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs; A Reinterpretation, Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, Series on Legislative Reform of Drug Policies, No. 12, March 2011. Some funding for the research and writing came from the Open Society Foundations. Thanks go to Beatriz Martinez, Nick Buxton and Robin Room for comments on early drafts and Gerry Stimson and the three anonymous reviewers for feedback on our initial submission.

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