1. Tom Blickman– TNI tblick@tni.org
Cannabis in the international drug control system and its effects on science
Tom Blickman– TNI

2. The Rise and Decline of Cannabis Prohibition
The History of Cannabis in the UN Drug Control System and Options For Reform
Dave Bewley-Taylor, Tom Blickman & Martin Jelsma
Transnational Institute / Global Drugs Policy Observatory
March 2014
decline

3. Cannabis prior to international control
Cannabis was widely used as a traditional medicine in China, India and Egypt as a remedy recommended for malaria, constipation, rheumatic pains, "absentmindedness" and "female disorders“, an analgesic during surgery, lower fevers, induce sleep, cure dysentery, stimulate appetite, etc.
Cannabis was also used in Greek and Roman medicine. Arab scientists were several centuries ahead of European knowledge of the curative power of cannabis.

4. Cannabis prior to international control
William O'Shaughnessy, a professor at the Medical College of Calcutta, who had observed its use in India, introduced cannabis as a medicine in Europe. In a 1839 report, he reported that a tincture of cannabis in alcohol, taken orally was an effective analgesic and called it "an anticonvulsant remedy of the greatest value."
O'Shaughnessy returned to England in 1842 and provided cannabis to pharmacists. Doctors in Europe and the United States began to prescribe it for a variety of physical conditions. It was listed in the United States Dispensatory in 1854.

5. Cannabis on shop shelves worldwide
"When pure and administered carefully, [cannabis] is one of the most valuable medicines we possess.”
British physician John Russell Reynolds in in The Lancet. He even prescribed it in the form of a natural tincture for his most illustrious patient, Queen Victoria.
By the mid-1890s, most pharmaceutical companies had developed pharmaceutical preparations of the plant. Its medicinal use was well-respected and fully established and cannabis was available and legal in nearly all countries in the late 19th century.

6. The early history of cannabis control
Prior to the multilateral drug control regime, cannabis was subject to a range of prohibition-based control measures within individual nation states. Early examples from the nineteenth century (Egypt, Greece, Brazil and South Africa for instance) were often implemented as a means of social control.
However, in India attempts to control cannabis led to The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report which proposed regulation.

7. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report (1894)
Result of a question raised in the British House of Commons by temperance crusaders, claiming that “lunatic asylums of India are filled with ganja smokers.”
In respect to the alleged mental effects of the drugs, the Commission came to the conclusion that the moderate use of cannabis produces “no injurious effects on the mind. […] As a rule these drugs do not tend to crime and violence.”
Moderate use cannabis was the rule, and excessive use was comparatively exceptional. Moderate use produces practically no ill effects.

8. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report (1894)
Key recommendations
Total prohibition of the cultivation of the hemp plant for narcotics, and of the manufacture, sale, or use of the drugs derived from it, is neither necessary nor expedient in consideration of their ascertained effects, of the prevalence of the habit of using them, of the social and religious feeling on the subject, and of the possibility of its driving the consumers to have recourse to other stimulants or narcotics which may be more deleterious.
The policy advocated is one of control and restriction, aimed at suppressing the excessive use and restraining the moderate use within due limits.

9. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report (1894)
Key recommendations
3. Regulation proposals:
adequate taxation, which can be best effected by the combination of a direct duty with the auction of the privilege of vend.
prohibiting cultivation, except under license, and centralizing cultivation.
limiting the number of shops for the retail sale of hemp drugs.
limiting the extent of legal possession. The limit of legal possession of ganja or charas or any preparation or mixture thereof would be 5 tola (about 60 grams), bhang or any mixture there of one quarter of a ser (a quarter of a litre).

10. Cannabis under the League of Nations
Second Opium Conference
Geneva 1924/1925
Mohamed El Guindy, the delegate from Egypt, recently nominally independent from Great Britain, proposed the inclusion of cannabis in the deliberations and moved to bring it under the scope of the Convention. He asserted that hashish was “at least as harmful as opium, if not more so .”
Support came from Turkey, Greece, South Africa and Brazil, countries that had experience with or banned cannabis already, although with only limited or virtually no success. Despite the British delegation’s argument that cannabis was not on the official agenda, El Guindy insisted and submitted an official proposal.

11. Cannabis under the League of Nations
El Guindy painted a horrific picture of the effects of hashish. Although he conceded that taken “occasionally and in small doses, hashish perhaps does not offer much danger,” he stressed that once a person “acquires the habit and becomes addicted to the drug [...] it is very difficult to escape.”
He claimed that a person “under the influence of hashish presents symptoms very similar to those of hysteria”; that the individual’s “intellectual faculties gradually weaken and the whole organism decays”; and that “the proportion of cases of insanity caused by the use of hashish varies from 30 to 60 per cent of the total number of cases occurring in Egypt.”
Cannabis not only led to insanity but was a gateway to other drugs, and vice versa. If it was not included on the list with opium and cocaine, he predicted, cannabis would replace them and “become a terrible menace to the whole world.”

12. Cannabis under the League of Nations
The assertion By El Guindy that 30 to 60 per cent of insanity was caused by hashish was an exaggeration.
The annual report of the Abbasiya Asylum in Cairo, the larger of Egypt’s two mental hospitals, recorded 715 admissions, of which only 19 (2.7 per cent) were attributed to hashish, considerably less than the 48 attributed to alcohol.
Moreover, even the modest number of cases attributed to cannabis were “not, strictly speaking, causes, but conditions associated with the mental disease.”

13. International Opium Convention of 1925
The Conference decided formally that ‘Indian hemp’ was as addictive and as dangerous as opium and should be treated accordingly, and cannabis was placed under legal international control.
The use of Indian hemp and the preparations derived therefrom may only be authorised for medical and scientific purposes.
Cannabis was included in the International Opium Convention of 1925, under a limited regime of international control: prohibition of cannabis exportation to countries where it was illegal and the requirement of an import certificate for countries that allowed its use.
The Convention only dealt with the transnational dimension of the Cannabis trade. The new control regime did not prohibit the production of or domestic trade in cannabis; it did not impose measures to reduce domestic consumption.

14. National responses to International Opium Convention of 1925
European countries gradually outlawed cannabis possession and often its use as well. For example, the United Kingdom’s Dangerous Drugs Act, 1928; a revised Dutch Opium Law, 1928; Germany’s second Opium Law,
These laws exceeded the obligations in the Convention, despite the absence of problems related to cannabis use in those countries.
Bans issued on a national level on a substance demonized on the basis of questionable evidence set into motion stricter controls internationally.
Soon after Egypt had forced cannabis control onto the international agenda, more powerful countries would become entangled in the process of increasing criminalisation and seeking tighter international prohibitive measures.
The British drugs law, for instance, would serve as model for legislation in the British West Indies.

15. Reefer madness Anslinger:
Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death – the most violence – causing drug in the history of mankind.

16. 1937 Marijuana Tax Act
Effectively banning cannabis in the country. The law imposed a tax upon importers, sellers, dealers and anyone handling the drug. The provisions of the Act were not designed to raise revenue, or even regulate the use of marijuana. The purpose was to provide the legal mechanisms to enforce the prohibition of all use of marijuana.

17. Towards the 1961 Single Convention
First draft of future single convention (February 1950) by the CND Secretariat. Proposals for cannabis were drastic. Two approaches, but both holding that recreational cannabis use needed to be rigorously discouraged.
First option
cannabis had no legitimate medical use that could not be met by other “less dangerous substances”.
with the exception of small amounts for scientific purposes, the production of cannabis would be prohibited completely.
Second option
recognized that cannabis did have legitimate medical purposes.
should be produced and traded exclusively by a state monopoly only for medical and scientific purposes.
ensure that no cannabis leaked into “illicit traffic” a range of measures, such as state-run cultivation and the uprooting of wild plants.
countries with significant traditional recreational use, could allow production on the strict condition of abolition of non-medical use in the future

18. Towards the 1961 Single Convention
Crucial issues was whether cannabis had any justifiable medical use.
WHO Expert Committee on Drugs Liable to Produce Addiction.
In 1952 the Committee declared “cannabis preparations are practically obsolete”.
Verdict was not substantiated by any evidence and was clearly influenced by ideological positions of certain individuals holding powerful positions.
The secretary of the Expert Committee was Pablo Osvaldo Wolff, the head of the Addiction Producing Drugs Section of the WHO ( ).
Wolff was part of the “inner circle” of control advocates and was made the WHO’s resident cannabis expert due to vigorous U.S. sponsorship.

19. Towards the 1961 Single Convention
Wolff determined the WHO position
Author Marijuana in Latin America: The Threat It Constitutes (1949)
Polemic against the La Guardia report (1944) that argued, in contrast to Anslinger and Wolff ’s opinion, that the use of marijuana did not lead to mental and moral degeneration.
“With every reason, marihuana [...] has been closely associated since the most remote time with insanity, with crime, with violence, and with brutality.”
“Changes thousands of persons into nothing more than human scum,” and “this vice... should be suppressed at any cost.”
“Weed of the brutal crime and of the burning hell,” an “exterminating demon which is now attacking our country.”
Users are referred to as addicts whose “motive belongs to a strain which is pure viciousness.”

20. Cannabis condemned: 1961 Single Convention
Cannabis classified among the most dangerous psychoactive substances
Article 4: “The parties shall take such legislative and administrative measures [...] to limit exclusively to medical and scientific purposes the production, manufacture, export, import, distribution of, trade in, use and possession of drugs”.
Cannabis included in Schedule I (containing those substances considered most addictive and most harmful) and in the strictest Schedule IV (containing those substances to be the most dangerous and regarded as exceptionally addictive and producing severe ill effects)
Due to its inclusion in Schedule IV, the Convention suggests that parties should consider prohibiting cannabis for medical purposes and only allow limited quantities for medical research.

21. Effects on scientific research
During its heyday ( ), more than 100 papers were published in the Western medical literature recommending it for various illnesses and discomforts. Physicians of a century ago knew more about cannabis than contemporary physicians do; certainly they were more interested in exploring its therapeutic potential.
Medical use of cannabis was already in decline by The potency of cannabis preparations (tinctures) was too variable, and individual responses to orally ingested cannabis seemed erratic and unpredictable. Tinctures are less effective than smoked marijuana.

22. Effects on scientific research
Another reason for the neglect of research on the analgesic properties of cannabis was the greatly increased use of opiates after the invention of the hypodermic syringe in the 1850s, which allowed soluble drugs to be injected for fast relief of pain; cannabis is insoluble in water and cannot easily be administered by injection.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the development of such synthetic drugs as aspirin, chloral hydrate, and barbiturates, which are chemically more stable than cannabis and therefore more reliable, hastened the decline of cannabis as a medicine.

23. Effects on scientific research
The demonization and prohibition of cannabis made scientific research almost impossible. Scientific research was aimed at the harmful effects of cannabis; not its potential beneficial effects.
The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 and subsequent US legislation undermined research and made medical use of cannabis difficult because of extensive paperwork required of doctors who wanted to use it. Cannabis was removed from the United States Pharmacopeia in 1941.
Pharmaceutical companies had lost interest in research and development.

24. Effects on scientific research
New York State Department of Health report (1982) on the therapeutic use of cannabis asked why more patients and physicians had not enrolled in the New York program:
physicians were skeptical because of their limited training and experience.
bureaucratic obstacles were enormous. "Hospital pharmacists and administrators complain about paperwork and procedures. Physicians complain about burdensome reporting and application requirements. "
many patients and physicians decided it was easier to get cannabis of good quality on the street.

25. WHO review of cannabis
The scheduling under the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs assumes a scientific justification.
Cannabis has never been evaluated by the World Health Organisation (WHO) since it was mandated the review of psychoactive substances in 1948.
Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD) will start a critical review. The ECDD in in November 2016 recognized:
An increase in the use of cannabis and its components for medical purposes
The emergence of new cannabis-related pharmaceutical preparations for therapeutic use
Cannabis has never been subject to a formal pre-review or critical review by the ECDD

26. WHO review of cannabis
The ECDD requested that the Secretariat prepare relevant documentation in accordance with the Guidance on the WHO review of psychoactive substances for international control in order to conduct pre-reviews for the following substances:
Cannabis plant and cannabis resin
Extracts and tinctures of cannabis
Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)
Cannabidiol (CBD)
Stereoisomers of THC.