General Article Cannabis regulation and the UN Treaties

Topic Selected: Cannabis
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Strategies for reform.

As jurisdictions enact reforms creating legal access to

cannabis for purposes other than exclusively “medical and scientific”, tensions surrounding the existing UN drug treaties and evolving law and practice in Member States continue to grow. How might governments and the UN system address these growing tensions in ways that acknowledge the policy shifts underway and help to modernise the drug treaty regime itself, and thereby reinforce the UN pillars of human rights, development, peace and security, and the rule of law?

These treaty tensions have become the ‘elephant in the room’ in key high-level forums, including the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs – obviously present, but studiously ignored.

Different countries and international agencies have different reasons for seeking to avoid directly engaging the question of what to do about these tensions. But the kinds of treaty breaches that may have seemed merely hypothetica...

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