As Drug War Dissent Mounts, U.N. Agency Rails Against Reforms It Cannot Stop

I’ve got a new column at
Forbes that details the Internation Narcotics Control
Board’s futile resistance against drug policy reform. Here is how
it starts:

Although marijuana remains illegal in the Netherlands, in 1976
the Dutch government began tolerating retail sales of
small amounts by so-called coffee shops. Thirty-eight years later,
the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), a U.N. agency
that describes its mission as “monitoring and supporting
Governments’ compliance with the international drug control
treaties,” is still complaining about that policy. In its
latest annual report, issued this week, the INCB notes that
the Dutch “tolerance policy” (gedoogbeleid) “allows small
amounts of cannabis to be sold and abused.” (INCB officials, like
hardline drug warriors everywhere, define all recreational
consumption of marijuana as abuse.) According to the INCB, such
tolerance is intolerable: “The Board reiterates its position that
such ‘coffee shops’ are in contravention of the provisions of the
international drug control conventions.”

If the INCB does not like Amsterdam’s cannabis cafés, which are
technically illegal, you can imagine how it feels about Denver’s
state-licensed pot shops. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. INCB
President Raymond Yans, never one to hold back criticism of
governments he deems insufficiently zealous in suppressing the
consumption of arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants, spells it out in
black and white. “We deeply regret the developments at the state
level in Colorado and Washington, in the United States, regarding
the legalization of the recreational use of cannabis,”
he writes. “INCB reiterates that these developments contravene
the provisions of the drug control conventions, which limit the use
of cannabis to medical and scientific use only.”

Read the whole thing.