Change is Possible: The History of the International Drug Control Regime and Implications for Future Policymaking

Abstract

The article, based upon an extensive literature review, reconstructs and analyzes the parallel evolution of the international drug control regime and the world opiate market, assessing the impact of the former on the latter until the rise of present-day mass markets. It shows that, since its inception, the regime has focused almost entirely on matters of supply. However, that focus has not always meant “prohibition”; until 1961, the key principle of the regime was “regulation.” Given the different forms drug control policy has taken in the past, the authors conclude it may be amenable to new forms in the future.

Keywords :

• drug control regime
• prohibition
• regulation
• UN conventions
• illegal drugs
• opiates
• heroin

THE AUTHORS

Letizia Paoli, Ph.D., is full professor of criminology at the K. U. Leuven Faculty of Law, Leuven, Belgium. Italian by birth, she received her Ph.D. in social and political sciences from the European University Institute in Florence in 1997. From 1998 to 2006, she was a senior research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany. She also served as consultant to the Italian Ministries of the Interior and Justice, the UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODCCP, now UNODC), and the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI).

Since the early 1990s, she has published extensively about the Italian mafia (e.g., Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style, Oxford University Press, 2003), organized crime (e.g., Fiijnaut and Paoli, eds., Organised Crime in Europe, Springer, 2004, and Paoli ed., Handbook of Organized Crime, Oxford University Press, 2011), and illegal drugs and related control policies (e.g., together with Greenfield and Reuter, The World Heroin Market: Can Supply Be Cut?, Oxford University Press, 2009). While organized crime and illegal drugs still count among her main research interests, Paoli has recently started investigating the trade in doping products, with a project on the supply of doping products in Italy funded by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

Victoria A. Greenfield, Ph.D., holds the Admiral William Crowe Chair in the Department of Economics at the US Naval Academy. Previously, she has held the positions of Senior Economist, RAND Corporation; Senior Economist for International Trade and Agriculture, Council of Economic Advisers, White House; Chief International Economist, Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, US Department of State; and Principal Analyst, Congressional Budget Office. She earned her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. Much of her research addresses illegal drug markets and supply-control policies, oftentimes drawing on her graduate training and professional experience as an agricultural and international trade economist. Forthcoming and recent drug-related publications include: “If Supply-Oriented Drug Policy is Broken, Can Harm Reduction Help Fix It?” International Journal of Drug Policy, in press (with Paoli); “Is Medicinal Opium Production Afghanistan's Answer? Lessons from India and the World Market,” Journal of Drug Policy Analysis, 2009 (with Paoli and Reuter); and “The World Heroin Market: Can Supply Be Cut?,” Oxford University Press, 2009 (also with Paoli and Reuter). At present, she and Paoli are examining the harms of criminal activities, including cocaine trafficking, and studying the supply of doping products. In addition, she is also serving on the National Research Council's committee to assess the costs of increased border enforcement to the US Department of Justice.

Peter Reuter, Ph.D., is professor in the School of Public Policy and in the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. He is Director of the Program on the Economics of Crime and Justice Policy at the University and also Senior Economist at RAND.

He founded and directed RAND's Drug Policy Research Center from 1989 to 1993; the Center is a multidisciplinary research program begun in 1989 with funding from a number of foundations. His early research focused on the organization of illegal markets and resulted in the publication of Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (MIT Press, 1983), which won the Leslie Wilkins award as most outstanding book of the year in criminology and criminal justice. Since 1985, most of his research has dealt with alternative approaches to controlling drug problems, both in the United States and Western Europe. He is co-author (with Letizia Paoli and Victorial Greenfield) of a new book from Oxford University Press: The World Heroin Market: Can Supply be Cut? His other books are (with Robert MacCoun) Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Places, Times and Vices (Cambridge University Press, 2001 and (with Edwin Truman) Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering (Institute for International Economics, 2004). From 1999 to 2004, he was editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. In 2007, he was elected the first president of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy.

Notes

2 Ironically, at Bayer, the invention of heroin is ascribed to Felix Hofmann, the same chemist who also synthesized acetylsalicylic acid, the active ingredient in Aspirin®. And, in an even more ironic twist of history, the invention of aspirin was initially neglected, while heroin was immediately marketed as a “heroic means” (de Ridder, 2000, pp. 73–74).

3 Albeit, the Chinese opium was only 30–70% as potent, in terms of morphine content, as twenty-first century opium (Dikötter et al., 2004, pp. 8–9).

4 It must be stressed, however, that the current figure is only for heroin and does not include other opioids, such as Oxycontin. If the household survey data are to be trusted, taking the consumption of other opioids into account would double the current number of chronic users (PR: CITE).

5 The Commission included all the colonial powers in the region–-Britain, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Portugal, and Russia—and China, Siam (now Thailand), Persia (now Iran), Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the United States (McAllister, 2000, p. 28).

6 The Convention was signed in The Hague by representatives from China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Persia (now Iran), Portugal, Russia, Siam (now Thailand), the UK, and the British overseas territories (including British India).

7 The text of all treaties can downloaded from http://untreaty.un.org/English/CTC/CTC_03.asp

8 China ratified the Hague Convention of 1912 as early as 1915, but did not underwrite later drug control treaties until the Single Convention of 1961.

9 For example, Greenfield (1997) discusses the use of information and “sunlight” in the context of the development and application of international labor standards.

10 Wright (1958) claims that the number of users was 1.5–2 million in a population of 19 million; he offers no documentation.

11 The expansion of heroin use, coupled with some abuses in the prescription of heroin and cocaine, led to the tightening of the “British System” in 1968: though maintenance policies were upheld, physicians lost the right to prescribe heroin or cocaine to their addicted patients, unless specially licensed (Spear, 2005).

12 To date, the market is still segmented in so much as opiates tend to travel along established routes from particular sources to particular destinations and are less fluid than legitimate international markets. Nonetheless, those routes span the globe (e.g., Afghanistan to Western Europe via Central Asia and Russia or Iran and Turkey); moreover, the routes can and have changed in response to changes in market conditions.