U.N. narcotics chief Yury Fedotov said on Wednesday that state legalization of marijuana violates international law.
Earlier this month, Oregon and Alaska joined Washington and Colorado in legalizing recreational marijuana. Washington D.C. also voted to legalize the growth and consumption of marijuana. Though pot remains illegal on the federal level, the Obama Administration has allowed individual states to determine their own marijuana policies.
Stanford University professor and drug policy adviser Keith Humphreys argues that the U.S. is in the clear as long as marijuana remains illegal on the federal level, because only the federal government, not the states, has signed any international drug treaties. However, others argue that unless the federal government enforces its drug policies on the state level, it is in violation of three different international treaties: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, which commit the U.S. to criminalize marijuana and punish offenders of the law.
U.N. narcotics official Yury Fedotov told reporters on Wednesday, “I don’t see how (the new laws) can be compatible with existing conventions.” William Brownfield, the U.S.’s top drug policy negotiator, asked, “How could I, as a representative of the Government of the United States of America, be intolerant of a government that permits experimentation with legalization of marijuana if two of the 50 states of the United States of America have chosen to walk down that road?”
The United States is not the only U.N. member moving toward legalizing pot. In 2013, Uruguay became the first country to legalize marijuana. Last month at a conference at the Brookings Institution discussing the global impacts of U.S. marijuana legalization, a representative from Mexico stated that the recent Laissez-faire approach to marijuana in the U.S. has, “created political space for Latin American countries to have a real debate [about drug policy].” If marijuana legalization continues, the U.N. might be forced to reevaluate their policies on marijuana at the 2016 U.N. special assembly on drugs. Though, Sandeep Chawla, who headed the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, says that the biggest obstacle on the road to marijuana legalization still remains– the bureaucracies themselves. If marijuana is legalized, it would put many people at agencies like the DEA out of work. He explained, “if you create a bureaucracy to solve a particular problem, when the problem is solved that bureaucracy is out of a job.” In any case, the consensus is that even a very loose interpretation of the treaties does not allow for the current status of legal weed in four U.S. states but that the task of cracking down on marijuana at this point might be too great. So, as far as the marijuana policies on national and international levels go, something’s got to give.
Contact the author:
Jennifer Swanson
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Article Sources:
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/12/7205927/weed-legalization-alaska-oregon
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/13/marijuana-un-state-by-state-legalization-violation/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/un-us-states-marijuana-legalization-not-line-international-law-1474533
Comments
I’m sure when the printing press was invented it put a lot of paradigms to rest. Perhaps Scrolls-A-Million subsequently went out of business.
Like the other dude said: Too fuck`n bad. That’s how shit works in the real world. The DEA’s lack of revenue isn’t my problem.
The fact that this is even an issue may be a much more serious moral concern than we realize, if that in order to sustain profits then we must maintain ridiculous outdated laws simply to offset lost revenue. That’s just fuck`n sick. That’s dogmatism. Laws are not scripture.
Stupid and unjustified laws, even the Internationally stupid ones, should be overturned. The DEA’s profit is another issue, and it sure as hell ain’t the public’s problem. The DEA’s is the Government. They print the Goddamn money, in the first place. WTF?
The truth is finally coming out. The war on drugs is a war on the American people for the sole purpose of keeping the organizations alive that were designed to fight a threat which does not even exist.
Things change. It’s evolution. Things that fail to change or adapt die off. Remember Blockbuster Video? They failed to change with the digital revolution. Blockbuster is gone. They set their business model that was based on a deprecated body of shifting sand.
Quote “If marijuana is legalized, it would put many people at agencies like the DEA out of work.”
That’s to fucking bad
I know right, boo hoo. You know what, now they get to find a new job, just like pretty much all of us have had to do in the past ten years.
Aren’t they just talking about legalizing cannabis? Yes, some of them will be out of jobs. This shouldn’t affect a majority of them, though.. There are still a vast number of other true narcotics that the DEA can try to stop (cocaine, meth, etc.). Worst case scenario, they can re-allocate them to new teams. If revenue is the problem, I agree with Dax and Sinoski. It’s not the American peoples fault our “government” sucks at money management.