Say no. There’s no chance of an amendment getting through in the near future.
Martin Jelsma 18, Director of the Drugs and Democracy Programme, Transnational Institute, Senior Research Associate at the Global Drug Policy Observatory (GDPO) at Swansea University; Neil Boister, Professor of International Law at the University of Canterbury; David Bewley-Taylor, Professor of International Relations and Public Policy, Director of the GDPO; Malgosia Fitzmaurice, Professor of Public International Law at Queen Mary University of London; John Walsh, Director for Drug Policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America, March 2018, “Balancing Treaty Stability and Change: Inter se modification of the UN drug control conventions to facilitate cannabis regulation,” WOLA, Policy Report 7, https://www.wola.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FINAL_Updated.pdf, kav
Reaching a new global consensus to revise or amend the UN drug control conventions in order to accommodate legally regulated markets for cannabis, coca or other psychoactive plants and substances controlled under these treaties, does not appear to be a viable political scenario for the short-term foreseeable future. The inability to reach global consensus is not limited to drug control; it is a dilemma that links drug control with other global issues.197 Meanwhile, the limits of flexible treaty interpretations have been reached and overstretching them any further with legally dubious arguments would result in undermining basic principles of international law.198 States that intend to move towards legal regulation, or that have already done so, are therefore obliged to explore other options to reconcile such policy changes with their obligations under international law. Only a few options are available that do not require the consent of all the treaty parties.199
The WHO can recommend after a critical review by its Expert Committee on Drug Dependence to ‘un-schedule’ a controlled substance (remove it from the treaty schedules), and the Commission on Narcotic Drugs can adopt the recommendation by a simple or two-thirds majority vote (for the 1961 and 1971 conventions respectively). As noted above, the WHO Expert Committee is in fact undertaking a pre-review process for cannabis and has announced a special meeting to discuss the classification of cannabis for June 2018.200 The outcome of the subsequent critical review could come to the CND agenda earliest by March 2019 and will probably result in its deletion from Schedule 4, and possibly to a de-scheduling from Schedule 1 to 2. The chance that a WHO recommendation to fully un-schedule cannabis from the treaties altogether would get the required CND majority, however, also looks under current political circumstances to be unlikely.
The only other available options that do not require consensus are either unilaterally by late reservations or denunciation and reaccession with new reservations, or collectively by inter se modification agreements among like-minded countries. All of these options are controversial because a generalized application of such procedures would erode the stability of international treaty regimes. Recourse to these options for the purpose of legitimising cannabis regulation will be contested, as was the case with Bolivia’s procedure which—in the end successfully—legitimised the legal regulation of its domestic coca market.