6.1 History of International Drug Controls

As described in previous chapters, prior to the early 20th century, it was common and even socially acceptable to use a variety of substances, both medically and non-medicinally/recreationally. This was the case in Canada, the U.S., and many nations around the world. Beginning in the 1800s, missionaries, church groups, and temperance societies in Canada, the U.S. and U.K. began organizing campaigns for the prohibition of alcohol and other psychoactive substances (Hallowell, 1972, Schweighofer, 1988) (See Chapter on Early Canadian Drug Policy), particularly among minority communities (Andersen, 2007; Belshaw, 2016), resulting in prohibitions on alcohol and other substances. The pressures exerted by religious groups and Temperance leagues helped persuade the United States to “initiate a worldwide anti-drug crusade” (Dion, 1999, para. 21).

The Shanghai Opium Commission (1909), a U.S. led initiative (UNODC, n.d.; Sinha, 2001), was the start of the development of international drug control efforts. Over the course of the next 40 years, numerous meetings of the international community were held, resulting in the formation of drug conventions/treaties aimed at strengthening, enhancing, and expanding upon an international drug control system (See Chronology: 100 Years of Drug Control below). Two key developments that occurred during this period of time were the formation of the League of Nations (1919), at the end of World War I, and its subsequent replacement by the United Nations (UN) (1945), formed at the end of World War II – both of which centralized the administration of drug control (Boister, 1996; Heilmann, 2011; Sinha, 2001).


In 1948 efforts began to consolidate the numerous existing drug treaties (Gregg, 1964; Heilmann, 2011; Sinha, 2001). This process took 13 years, resulting in the Single Convention (1961), one of three parts of the current international system of drug control. The international drug control efforts that followed include: The Convention on Psychotropic Drugs (1971); The Single Protocol (1972) (an amendment to the Single Convention, 1961), and The Convention Against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotics Drugs and Psychoactive Substances (1988) (UNODC, n.d.). Two constant themes run through the international drug control conventions, from 1909 to the present. The first is the differentiation between
legitimate and illegitimate use of substances, with legitimate use being for scientific and/or medical purposes (Sinha, 2001). The second is the reinforcement and legitimation of prohibitionist/criminalization policies, both nationally and internationally, as the means by which to control the illegitimate manufacture, trade, and use of psychoactive substances.

 

timeline of drug control
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Chronology: 100 Years of Drug Control. ©United Nations (n.d.). All rights reserved. Image used with permission.

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Psychoactive Substances & Society (2nd Edition) Copyright © 2024 by Jacqueline Lewis & Jillian Holland-Penney is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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