The Beckley Foundation's Global Cannabis Commission

To view Commissioners' Conclusions & Recommendations, please click here

To view the complete Global Cannabis Commission Report, please click here

To view the BFDPP Briefing Paper: "An Overview of Cannabis Policy: Moving Beyond Stalemate"click here

To view press coverage of the Global Cannabis Commission Report, please click here

Commissioners Bios

Seminar Details

The Report is to be co-published with Oxford University Press in early 2009.

The United Nations Strategic Drug Policy Review

In 1998, the international community agreed to a 10-year programme of activity for the control of illegal drug use and markets. These agreements were made at a United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) held in New York in June of that year, and a commitment was made to review progress in 2008. Clearly, the international community will not be able to report unequivocal success in anti-drug programmes at this review (to be held in 2009), as drugs are purer, cheaper, and more widely available than ever before. The laws themselves are often enforced in an arbitrary fashion, leading to discrimination against oppressed minorities. Nowhere is this more evident than with cannabis, used by a conservatively estimated 160 million people worldwide. There is increasing disagreement between governments on the appropriate policies to adopt. It is therefore essential that the process of review in 2009 be as transparent as possible, and that experts from the field have the maximum opportunity to engage with the government officials and politicians who will ultimately decide on future directions.

The History of Cannabis Use and Prohibition

Cannabis came under the control of the international narcotics treaties as an afterthought, in an era when use of the drug was confined to relatively small groups in a scattering of cultures. In the last half-century, the situation has been transformed. Smoking or other use of cannabis has become a part of youth culture in country after country. To serve this demand, huge international and national illicit markets have arisen. Strenuous efforts to enforce prohibition by policing and by quasi-military operations against illicit growing and sale have largely failed in their principal objective. Meanwhile, the efforts in themselves create substantial anguish and social harms. In the United States, about three-quarters of a million citizens are arrested every year for cannabis possession, and arrest figures are also high elsewhere.

While rigorous enforcement of the conventions without consideration of alternative paths continues in many countries, elsewhere penalties and enforcement have diminished de-facto or in law. Substantive change is hindered however by a rigid international system of regulation, which is often out of touch with the realities.

The Global Cannabis Commission

The Cannabis Commission is an international group of academics and experts in drug policy analysis, commissioned by the Beckley Foundation to produce a Report on cannabis policy in a global perspective. The Report will be finished by September 2008, in time to be taken into account in the global debate on drug policies in connection with the 2009 UNGASS evaluation. It will provide a comprehensive overview of the evidence that a policymaker at the national or international level will need to know in considering how to move beyond the present stalemate on cannabis policy.

This report contains:

•  an opening chapter giving an overview of the global history of cannabis in recent decades, touching on patterns and trends in use and the cultural politics of cannabis, and laying out the plan for the rest of the book;

•  an up-to-date review of what is known about the health consequences of cannabis use.  This includes harms to physical and mental health, and performance effects, such as on driving. The extent of danger of cannabis is considered in a public health perspective, in a comparative frame with harms from other drugs – tobacco, alcohol, opiates, etc;

•  the evidence on the effects of the current system of prohibition and control, including the size and organization of the illicit cannabis market, the costs and effectiveness of efforts to eliminate the market through police and criminal justice systems, and the effects of criminalization on users and their families;

•  a review of policy initiatives at national and sub-national levels of reform within the international prohibition system intended to mitigate adverse effects. These include initiatives to decriminalize cannabis possession, to reduce penalties for use or possession, to divert to treatment or other handling, and to license and tolerate use, such as with the Dutch coffee shop system;

•  an assessment of the effects of reforms within the system. The available evidence is summarized on the effects of different reforms on amount and patterns of use and harm, and on secondary adverse consequences of arrest and other enforcement;

•  a review of the potential means for altering the present international convention status of cannabis, to allow controlled availability for adult use in national or sub-national regulatory regimes.  While there are a variety of possible paths available for an individual country or a group of nations, primary attention is given to those most likely to be feasible in terms of norms of international law and of political realities. The chapter includes consideration of concrete provisions in a possible new Convention on cannabis, on the model of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control;

•  a final chapter drawing conclusions and making recommendations on possible paths forward, towards more effective and just policies on cannabis, at both national and international levels.

To help maximise the impact and awareness of the report, we are proposing to convene a group of International Notables who will endorse the Conclusions and Recommendations, thereby adding gravitas to the Commissioners' findings.

The Cannabis Commission Report is to be published as a book by the Oxford University Press, to ensure that its impact is as widespread as possible. Besides this book, the principal findings of the Report will be collated in a separate document, together with the Conclusions and Recommendations, which will provide an accessible summary from which policymakers may inform themselves.

We believe that this Report with its Conclusions and Recommendations, could serve as a blueprint for the development of future evidence-based drug policies. We therefore hope that its analysis and its findings will reach as large an audience as possible, and that, in due course, a more beneficent cannabis policy may be developed.

This project has been convened by Amanda Neidpath,
Director of the Beckley Foundation