Tag: United Nations

World Health Organization To UN: Reclassify Cannabis

WHO is calling for the classification to be updated to reflect the medical uses of marijuana.

The World Health Organization is calling on the United Nations to change the classification of cannabis to acknowledge that the drug does have some medicinal purposes.

According to Futurism, cannabis is currently considered a Schedule IV drug by the UN. This designation is the most tightly controlled, and reserved for drugs that show “particularly dangerous properties.” It was set by an international drug treaty passed in 1961.

However, according to information published in the journal BMJ, the World Health Organization is calling for the classification to be updated to reflect the medical uses of marijuana.

“The World Health Organization has proposed rescheduling cannabis within international law to take account of the growing evidence for medical applications of the drug, reversing its position held for the past 60 years that cannabis should not be used in legitimate medical practice,” the report authors wrote.

According to the report, The WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence started reconsidering marijuana’s classification last year. The committee released a report with its findings and recommendations.

“The Committee concluded that the inclusion of cannabis and cannabis resin in Schedule IV is not consistent with the criteria for a drug to be placed in Schedule IV,” the report reads.

It goes on to recommend that marijuana and its compounds be reclassified as Schedule I or II drugs, which are less tightly controlled. The recommendations could be voted on by the United Nations member countries as soon as March, which would change the way that marijuana is handled under international law.

However, it would have no bearing on how cannabis is scheduled federally in the United States, which uses an entirely different system of classification.

Still, marijuana advocates, including a US Air Force veteran Michael Krawitz, said that the reclassification is long overdue.

“The placement of cannabis in the 1961 treaty, in the absence of scientific evidence, was a terrible injustice,” he told Forbes. “Today the World Health Organization has gone a long way towards setting the record straight. It is time for us all to support the World Health Organization’s recommendations and ensure politics don’t trump science.”

Kenzi Riboulet Zemouli, the head of research at Paris-based non-profit For Alternative Approaches to Addiction Think & Do Tank, told Leafly that the measure is “a beginning of a new evidence and health-oriented cycle for international Cannabis policy.”

“This is the best outcome that WHO could possibly have come up with,” Riboulet Zemouli said.

View the original article at thefix.com

22 February 2019
Marijuana Should Be Rescheduled, World Health Organization Says

The UN authority is joining those who are demanding we take another look at marijuana’s classification.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that marijuana has been considered a Schedule IV drug, the Single Convention’s most restrictive category, for far too long. They believe marijuana’s current scheduling goes against science, but are making it clear they are stopping short of allowing legalization.

The international scheduling of drugs was outlined in the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961, which categorized drugs as most harmful and restricted for medical use in Schedule I to the more relaxed Schedule III.

Their pattern is consistent with the United States’ scheduling order, up until Schedule IV. Breaking the pattern, the Single Convention defines Schedule IV drugs as an especially dangerous subset of Schedule I drugs requiring special attention and restrictions.

Currently, marijuana is dual-categorized as Schedule I federally and a Schedule IV drug internationally, which places it on the same level as synthetic opioids.

The WHO suggests that the marijuana plant and cannabis resins be taken off of Schedule IV, downgrading it to Schedule I internationally. They also want to explicitly state that CBD preparations with a THC content of lower than 0.2% will be considered as “not under international control” in any way.

They also suggest that cannabis extracts, tinctures, and pharmaceutical THC compounds be taken from Schedule I down to Schedule III.

Despite all the rescheduling, the WHO is not recommending that any country legalize marijuana, and in fact would consider such a move a violation of some stricter international treaties. However, the move is an admission that most governments have gotten marijuana wrong.

“The placement of cannabis in the 1961 treaty, in the absence of scientific evidence, was a terrible injustice,” said legalization advocate Michael Krawitz. “Today the World Health Organization has gone a long way towards setting the record straight. It is time for us all to support the World Health Organization’s recommendations and ensure politics don’t trump science.”

Despite not explicitly advocating for legalization, this may tip the scales in favor of countries that no longer want to enforce marijuana prohibition. Canada and Uruguay, which have decided to legalize marijuana even before the WHO’s announcement, are expected to support the move. More restrictive countries like China and Russia are expected to disapprove.

The United States’ federal stance remains to be seen. Despite marijuana being legal in some form in more than half of the U.S., some say President Trump’s Attorney General nominee might go either way.

View the original article at thefix.com

4 February 2019
Global War On Drugs Is A Failure, Report Says

According to a new report, in the last decade, drug-related deaths have increased by 145%.

The International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC, a non-governmental network of 177 organizations) released a report calling the United Nations’ global war on drugs a failure.

The report addressed the United Nations’ goal to eliminate the illegal drug market by 2019 through a “War on Drugs” approach—which has had negligible effects on global drug supply while negatively impacting human rights, development, and security.

The report recounted the terrible statistics: in the last decade, drug-related deaths have increased by 145%—with 71,000 estimated overdose deaths in the United States in 2017.

In the past decade, at least 4,000 people were executed for drug-related offenses worldwide. The policy of extremism regarding drug dealers in the Philippines resulted in thousands of extrajudicial killings.

In the United States, drug laws have resulted in mass incarceration. In many cases, inmates are convicted for personal possession of a drug. One in five inmates is currently imprisoned for drug offenses.

According to CNN, the IDPC report asked the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs to look for an alternate narcotics strategy for the next 10 years.

“The fact that governments and the UN do not see fit to properly evaluate the disastrous impact of the last ten years of drug policy is depressingly unsurprising,” Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for the UN Secretary-General, said to CNN. “Governments will meet next March at the UN and will likely rubber-stamp more of the same for the next decade in drug policy. This would be a gross dereliction of duty and a recipe for more blood spilled in the name of drug control.”

In March, U.S. President Donald Trump proposed making drug trafficking a capital offense. The report states that while international standards do not allow for the death penalty for drug offenses, 33 jurisdictions retain the death penalty and stand in violation of the agreed standard.

“What we learn from the IDPC shadow report is compelling. Since governments started collecting data on drugs in the 1990s, the cultivation, consumption and illegal trafficking of drugs have reached record levels,” said Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, in the report’s foreword.

“Moreover, current drug policies are a serious obstacle to other social and economic objectives and the ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in millions of people murdered, disappeared, or internally displaced.”

View the original article at thefix.com

24 October 2018
Latin America Should Consider Legalizing Drugs, United Nations Official Says

The head of a UN economic commission for Latin America says “illegality is killing people.”

A United Nations official argued that Latin American should seriously consider legalizing drugs in order to save lives, Newsweek reported. Alicia Bárcena, the head of a UN economic commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, says that the region needs to take a fresh look at the impact of the drug trade.

Especially in Mexico, thousands of people die annually in connection to narcotics. In fact, 2017 was the worst year yet for drug-related murders.

According to Time, Mexico had nearly 30,000 murders last year (the Interior Department reported 29,168 homicides), which is “more than 2011 at the peak of Mexico’s drug cartel-stoked violence.”

What’s worse is that Mexico’s death toll is the highest ever since the government began keeping homicide records in 1997.

Bárcena says the time has come to overhaul Latin America’s drug strategy: “I’m going to be very provocative,” she acknowledged at a forum in Paris. “Who would drug legalization be good for? Latin America and the Caribbean, for God’s sake. Because the illegality is what’s killing people,” she said.

Peru, Bolivia and Colombia are among the world’s top producers of coca leaves, which are used to make cocaine. Mexico is the primary hub through which cocaine is smuggled from those South American countries to the United States. (The U.S. is among the world’s largest markets for cocaine.)

Cocaine, however, isn’t the only drug that’s spurred the record number of murders throughout Latin America: the precipitous rise of Mexico’s crystal meth and heroin markets in recent years is also to blame. U.S. News & World Report observed that those drugs have hugely disrupted drug trafficking in Latin America.

“Cartel fragmentation is a big part of the story of why violence is increasing,” said Alejandro Hope, a former Mexican federal intelligence official. “This has really accelerated in the last couple of years. It’s the changing nature of the game.”

Given the complicated attitudes toward drug legalization in the world, especially with the United States’ increasingly relaxed stance on marijuana, there are many who believe Bárcena’s proposal isn’t so much controversial as it is forward-thinking.

As Bradley Tusk wrote in a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed, Mexicans are dying over drugs that aren’t even intended for Mexican consumers. Tusk, a former deputy governor of Illinois, considered what the landscape would look like if the Mexican government decided to throw up its hands and say the U.S. could deal with drug problems at its border.

“Almost immediately, many of the problems plaguing Mexico start to diminish. If there’s no attempted enforcement of drug laws, there’s no more opportunity for corruption. Who are you going to bribe when drugs are already legal?” Tusk asked. “And if there’s no attempt to stop the movement of drugs—if it can be done openly and freely—there’s no need for most of the violence consuming cities like Juarez.”

While cartels would still initially be at war with one another, he conceded, that too would drop off. “When bloodshed and violence is no longer necessary, it’s also no longer seen as an appropriate cost of doing business,” he said.

View the original article at thefix.com

1 June 2018