Fully 50 percent of American youths will have tried marijuana by the time they reach 21 said Peter Reuter, University of Maryland professor and co-author of Cannabis Policy: Moving beyond Stalemate (Oxford University Press, 2010). Still, marijuana use among young people has steadily declined over the past thirty years.
At the same time, rates of arrest for the possession and use of cannabis have increased over the years—and not just in the United States but other Western countries as well (such as Switzerland).
The findings compiled in Cannabis Policy reveal little variance in consumption patterns among the handful of Western countries studied, despite the diversity in control policies—from outright criminalization, to the legalization of medical cannabis, decriminalization, and prohibition without enforcement.
To date, no country has moved toward a regulated market, despite the fact that addiction rates are considered low at 10 percent, said Reuter, and many policy makers favor treating marijuana separately from more noxious drugs like cocaine and heroine. The problem is that two major international conventions stand in the way. The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotics Drugs banned the use, possession, trade and distribution of all narcotic drugs, including marijuana, outside of its legitimate use in science, while a 1988 anti-trafficking Convention further consolidated and codified international anti-drug regulations.
For countries looking to revamp marijuana policy, said Cannabis Policy co-author and University of Melbourne professor Robin Room, this presents a prohibitive obstacle. “Treaties have imposed strong limits on what can be done.”
Effectively, Room said, States can look inward to existing models. For example, the Netherlands employs a policy of prohibition without enforcement and Australia imposes fines—“equivalent to a minor traffic offense”—for the possession of small amounts of cannabis, while the U.S. and Canada favor decriminalization and de-penalization policies. Still, these policies present their own set of obstacles. For the Netherlands, a lack of enforcement has led to the back door problem: “what is “legally” sold is illegally bought,” Room explained. And decriminalization policies prohibit the possession, not the use, of small amounts of cannabis.
But there is an alternative option.
States can choose to opt out of the treaties altogether, and there are two ways to do this. States can withdraw from the treaties and re-accede with reservations—which is not an unprecedented move—or States can adopt a new convention among like-minded nations. Room added that existing inter-American systems, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, can provide the platform for such an initiative.
Marijuana today is far stronger than it was 30 years ago, “this is not your father’s pot,” Reuter quipped. The black market for cannabis is worth an estimated 10 to 20 billion dollars. And laws today do not align with behavior. At the same time, legalizing marijuana is not a panacea to the global narcotics crisis. If marijuana were legalized, a popular theory goes, large cartels would be crippled—except not according to Reuter who believes this loss would amount to little less than a dent in day-to-day business. Cannabis revenues amount to only a fraction of total narcotic revenues of large Latin American cartels, he added. And legalizing marijuana is likely to increase consumption, if only modestly.
Still, according to Reuter and Room, existing marijuana policies are hardly tenable and, they reminded their audience, “the legalization of a consumer good does not equal pre-availability without restrictions.”
