Single Convention On Narcotic Drugs - Penal Provisions

Penal Provisions

Article 36 requires Parties to criminalize "cultivation, production, manufacture, extraction, preparation, possession, offering, offering for sale, distribution, purchase, sale, delivery on any terms whatsoever, brokerage, dispatch, dispatch in transit, transport, importation and exportation of drugs contrary to the provisions of this Convention," as well as "ntentional participation in, conspiracy to commit and attempts to commit, any of such offences, and preparatory acts and financial operations in connexion with the offences referred to in this article".

The Article also provides for extradition of drug offenders, although a Party has a right to refuse to extradite a suspect if "competent authorities consider that the offense is not sufficiently serious." A 1971 amendment to the Article grants nations the discretion to substitute "treatment, education, after-care, rehabilitation and social reintegration" for criminal penalties if the offender is a drug abuser. A loophole in the Single Convention is that it requires Parties to place anti-drug laws on the books, but does not clearly mandate their enforcement, except in the case of drug cultivation.

Drug enforcement varies widely between nations. Many European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and, most famously, the Netherlands, do not prosecute all petty drug offenses. Dutch coffee shops are allowed to sell small amounts of cannabis to consumers. However, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport's report, Drugs Policy in the Netherlands, notes that large-scale "roduction and trafficking are dealt with severely under the criminal law, in accordance with the UN Single Convention. Each year the Public Prosecutions Department deals with an average of 10,000 cases involving infringements of the Opium Act." Some of the most severe penalties for drug trafficking are handed down in certain Asian countries, such as Malaysia, which mandate capital punishment for offenses involving amounts over a certain threshold. Singapore mandates the death penalty for trafficking in 15 g (half an ounce) of heroin, 30 g of cocaine or 500 g of cannabis. Most nations, such as France and the United States, find a middle ground, imposing a spectrum of sanctions ranging from probation to life imprisonment for drug offenses.

The Single Convention's penal provisions frequently begin with clauses such as "Subject to its constitutional limitations, each Party shall . . ." Thus, if a nation's constitution prohibited instituting the criminal penalties called for by the Single Convention, those provisions would not be binding on that country. However, Professor Cindy Fazey's A Growing Market: The Domestic Cultivation of Cannabis points out, "Whilst this strategy may be practical politics for some countries, critics will ask why it has taken almost half a century to discover that the UN conventions conflict with a constitutional principle. The argument is particularly difficult to deploy for countries like Britain, where constitutional principles are not formalized or codified to any significant degree." However the current move in Switzerland to enshrine cannabis decriminalization in the national constitution by popular initiative could profit from this rule.