Cannabis prohibition laws were initially established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through disparate national drug control initiatives.Over the course of the nineteenth century, cannabis medical uses were regulated in a patchwork manner as part of wider legal frameworks governing the production and sale of pharmaceuticals. In the US, cannabis use began to be perceived as a social problem that should be a subject of criminal regulation during the Progressive Era.This criminalization campaign was inspired by the legislative inroads made by the temperance movement during that period and by awakening nativist sentiments toward incoming Mexican migrants, whose habits of marijuana smoking became major objects of media attention and public anxiety.In 1915, California introduced the nation’s first anti-marijuana criminal prohibition. Three decades later, such prohibitions appeared in the statute books of forty-six states and a series of marijuana-related federal offenses were included in the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.The transnational legal ordering of cannabis regulations originated during the League of Nations era.An earlier international drug convention, signed at The Hague in 1912, focused on regulating opium, morphine, and cocaine and did not include implementation mechanisms. Under the League’s auspices, new requirements concerning the regulation of medical and non-medical uses of cannabis were introduced at the 1925 International Opium Convention. However, the pre-UN frameworks of international drug control did not place emphasis on the use of punitive measures to regulate cannabis or other psychoactive substances. Although the US had strongly advocated the introduction of a strict prohibitionist approach, this position was met with resistance from European colonial powers that had significant financial interests in the production of opium and coca and the manufacturing of their derivatives.
In the absence of an international consensus regarding the need to strengthen the criminal regulation of illicit drug use,vertical grow system the preUN drug control framework focused on the development of administrative measures to govern cross-border commodity flows and to encourage a more effective domestic regulation of local drug markets.Following WWII, the growing capacity of the US to shape the rules and institutions of the international drug control system facilitated the move of the prohibitionist approach from the periphery to the center of the policy agenda.To a considerable extent, the institutionalization of the cannabis prohibition TLO provides a paradigmatic example of what has been usefully conceptualized as “globalized localism”—a process by which policy models that originated in the distinctive cultural and institutional contexts of a powerful country come to be perceived as global standards due to their inclusion in treaties, diagnostic indicators, interpretive guidelines, and other instruments of transnational legal diffusion. The introduction of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 served as an important milestone in this process.The Convention frames the issue of drug use as a moral problem, stating in its preamble that “addiction to narcotic drugs constitutes a serious evil for the individual and is fraught with social and economic danger to mankind.” In line with this moralizing framing, the Convention requires signatory countries to criminalize a wide range of drug-related activities. Responding to the increasing production and use of synthetic drugs as part of the rise of the counter-cultural movements of the late 1960s, the 1971 Psychotropic Drug Treaty applied these policy principles to synthetic psychoactive drugs, such as opioids and amphetamine-type stimulants. The 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances further expanded the array of criminal justice enforcement measures states are required to adopt. Importantly, however, the mandatory criminalization norms established by the UN drug conventions are defined in a manner that leaves two major sources of textual ambiguity regarding their scope of application.
First, the conventions deliberately refrain from providing a definition of what constitutes medical and scientific uses of drugs. Second, they clarify that countries should implement the duty to criminalize drug-related activities in accordance with their domestic constitutional principles. As is often the case, these two provisions are products of efforts to paper over divergent policy preferences. During the negotiations of the Single Convention, several countries objected to banning certain drugs that have traditional and quasi-medical uses among indigenous populations. India, for example, expressed concerns regarding the implied need to criminalize traditional uses of bhang, which is made from cannabis leaves with a low Tetrahydrocannabinol content. Other countries emphasized the need to retain interpretive flexibility in light of the possibility that future research would reveal new medical benefits. The resulting compromise encouraged countries that would not have otherwise supported the prohibitionist principles set by the treaties to come on board. However, this compromise also sowed the seeds of later controversies regarding the ways in which cannabis prohibition norms should be applied. As the following discussion shows, these controversies will set recursive processes of transnational legal change in motion, leading to the settling and unsettling of specific interpretations of the scope and meaning of these norms.It is an irony of history that the first decade following the entry into force of the Single Convention experienced a marked increase in the prevalence of cannabis use in Western countries. When the Single Convention was signed in 1961, cannabis use was particularly prevalent in developing countries where the plant was traditionally cultivated, while it had little impact on mainstream culture in North America and Europe. By the end of the decade, the drug acquired unprecedented political salience not only in light of objective increases in the prevalence of its use but also due to its symbolic association with emerging countercultures and the perceived threat they putatively posed to public morality. These dramatic changes intensified the enforcement of cannabis offenses, but they also attracted heightened public attention to the negative consequences of such enforcement efforts.
In the late 1960s, there was an historical increase in the rates of arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of cannabis users in various Western countries. The magnitude of this change was most remarkable in the US. In California, for example, the number of people arrested for marijuana offenses increased from about 5,000 in 1960 to 37,514 in 1967.Arrests for cannabis possession became increasingly common in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada as well.The civil rights implications of these increased levels of drug law enforcement generated vigorous public debate on the justifications of treating cannabis on par with other psychoactive substances that are widely perceived to be more dangerous and harmful.Disagreements regarding whether cannabis should be classified under the strictest schedules of the UN drug control treaties were already evident during the Plenipotentiary Conference, which drafted the Single Convention.However, it was only as a result of the increased enforcement of cannabis prohibitions that such disagreements precipitated domestic forms of political and legal resistance. Due to increasing public criticism, national governments in several countries appointed public committees to consider the effectiveness of the existing laws. These committees directed strong criticism towards the criminological and medical underpinnings of the prohibitionist approach and sided with proponents of the decriminalization of mild forms of cannabis use. President Nixon’s famous identification of drug abuse as “America’s public enemy number one” led to the nomination of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse . To the surprise of many, the Commission’s 1972 Report, entitled Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, concurred with the liberal approach endorsed by other national investigation committees. While the Commission emphasized that cannabis was not a harmless substance, it stressed that its dangers had often been overstated. It advocated repealing the criminal prohibitions on the possession of small amounts of marijuana and establishing alternative measures to address the public health concerns associated with cannabis use. Such reforms, the Commission stated,mobile grow systems are needed to relieve “the law enforcement community of the responsibility for enforcing a law of questionable utility, and one which they cannot fully enforce.”These recommendations were repudiated by the Nixon administration, but they inspired grassroots activists to mobilize cannabis liberalization reforms at the state and local levels. In 1973, Oregon became the first state that decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana. Eleven states followed suit during the next half of the decade.The failure of the US national administration to secure the compliance of state governments with the prohibitionist norms it sought to propagate internationally provided a clear indication of the decline of the cannabis prohibition TLO. However, rather than precipitating the global circulation of new models of cannabis-liberalization reform, this early crisis stimulated new cycles of recursive transnational lawmaking, leading to the entrenchment of the prohibitionist approach. In the US, calls to reintroduce tougher drug laws resonated with the wider conservative offensive against the putative “soft on crime” inclinations of liberal policymakers in the post-civil rights era.Opponents of legalization sought to challenge the public health frame that gained increasing influence in the wake of the Shafer Commission’s Report and to contextualize the issue of cannabis use as yet another symptom of a putative law and order crisis in American cities.
The proliferation of grassroots parents’ movements lobbying for the stricter regulation of marijuana provided considerable political momentum for the introduction of tougher penalties for trafficking and possession offenses.The process by which cannabis prohibition norms again became settled at the national level in the US provided facilitative conditions for the increasing involvement of the federal government in exporting its drug policies to other countries. This effort became increasingly consequential in an historical moment in which the US came to perceive itself “not just as a powerful state operating in a world of anarchy” but as “a producer of world order.”With the end of the Cold War, new discourses of “securitization” emerged as part of the search for a new way of grounding America’s internationalist engagement.Drug policy became increasingly aligned with national security issues pertaining to the activities of insurgent and terrorist groups in Latin American countries and to the risks posed by these groups to the democratic stability and peace in the region.This new frame of diagnosing the implications of the illegal drug trade led to the development of new modes of defining the goals of US counternarcotic policies as well as the strategies through which such goals should be pursued. These new strategies have sought to reduce drug production at the source, to combat drug trafficking en route to US borders, to dismantle international illicit drug networks, to reduce drug demand at home and abroad, and to incentivize foreign governments to cooperate with US counternarcotic goals. The institutionalization of these strategies necessitated strengthening the capacity of the US government to influence the drug policies of other countries and to dominate the transnational agenda of cannabis control. From the mid-1980s onwards, the US government institutionalized an array of multilateral, bilateral, and unilateral measures intended to coerce, induce, and socialize other countries to cooperate with its counternarcotic strategies.Its multilateral efforts have largely been based on the extensive funding and support of international and regional organizations that are committed to the prohibitionist approach. In this context, the US has consistently pushed for an expansion of the International Narcotic Control Board’s monitoring authority and has served as a staunchest defender of its prohibitionist policies.Building on and expanding the scope of the international obligations enshrined in the Vienna Convention and the INCB recommendations, the US has made extensive use of bilateral treaties to create an issue-linkage between states’ willingness to adopt zero-tolerance models of drug policy and their eligibility for foreign aid. Over the next decades, such bilateral agreements provided a basis for the operation of extensive cooperation and capacity-building projects in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Ghana, Thailand, and many others. Along with these multilateral and bilateral instruments used to influence the drug policies of other countries, the US government has had an extensive reliance on unilateral tools of imposing economic and reputational sanctions on non-compliant states. In 1986, Congress introduced the Omnibus Drug Enforcement, Education, and Control Act, which created a certification process for drug-producing and drug-transit countries.The certification process requires the president to withdraw financial assistance and support in multilateral lending institutions from countries that fail to comply with requisite benchmarks of anti-drug policy. To enable congressional deliberations over such sanctions, the US Department of State submits an annual International Narcotic Control Strategy Report that identifies the major illicit drug-producing and drug-transit countries and evaluates the extent to which their domestic policies are in compliance with the US counternarcotic agenda.