Talk:Convention on Psychotropic Substances
Discussion page of Convention on Psychotropic Substances
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Page scope
Convention on Psychotropic Substances covers the Convention on Psychotropic Substances adopted at Vienna on 21 February 1971. The article is about what the treaty does to cannabis, which is limited: it has no provision on the cannabis plant or its cultivation, and its cannabis content is the tetrahydrocannabinol entries in its schedules and the proposals to move them. The other substances in its schedules appear only where a cannabis provision needs them. The Single Convention, the 1988 Convention, the control bodies and the national laws have pages of their own.
Data verification
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Discussion
Sources
- Treaty text. The provisions are read from the English text published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (
convention_1971_en.pdf), which prints the Final Act of the 1971 conference and a Secretariat note on the Procès-Verbal of Rectification of 15 August 1973. Its lists of substances are undated and include later additions, so the schedule as adopted is cited from the United Nations Treaty Series (vol. 1019, No. 14956, p. 328) and the present schedules from the International Narcotics Control Board's Green List (36th edition, 2025). - Reading the Commentary. The Commentary of 1976 (E/CN.7/589, UN Sales No. E.76.XI.5) was written by Adolf Lande under the responsibility of the UN Office of Legal Affairs. The UNODC scan has no text layer and was read through optical character recognition; the passages quoted or paraphrased on the article were checked against the page images (pp. 3, 12, 23–25, 37–39, 359, 385, 392, 394).
- Status. The dates, the convening resolution and the party count (184) are from the UN Treaty Collection status page (Chapter VI, 16), read on 15 October 2026. No reservation on that page concerns cannabis; the article 32(4) reservations recorded there concern peyote, ayahuasca and San Pedro.
- Scheduling history. The moves of 1989–2014 are from the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence's critical review of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol prepared for its 41st meeting (2018), section 1.7 "WHO Review History". The recommendations of 2019 are from the WHO Director-General's letter of 24 January 2019; the voting procedure and the votes of 2 December 2020 are from the Commission's report E/2020/28/Add.1.
- Bewley-Taylor, Blickman and Jelsma (2014) is a policy report of the Transnational Institute and the Global Drug Policy Observatory. Its account of the 1971 conference rests on the conference's official records (E/CONF.58/7/Add.1), which were not read directly; its account and judgements are attributed to its authors on the article.
Where the sources disagree
- The Schedule I entry as adopted.' The United Nations Treaty Series prints entry 10 of Schedule I as "tetrahydrocannabinols". The Commentary (p. 392) prints it as "tetrahydrocannabinols, all isomers", and states that the isomers of the tetrahydrocannabinols were the only isomers the conference placed under control (pp. 23, 394). The article quotes the Treaty Series wording for the entry and gives the Commentarys form as its printing.
- The Schedule II entry name. The UNODC text lists the entry as DRONABINOL, the international non-proprietary name, with a note that the name covers only the (−)-trans isomer. The Green List of 2025 gives the entry as "delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and its stereochemical variants". Both are quoted on the article.
Open points
- The Commission's decision of 1991 moving delta-9-THC to Schedule II, and its vote of March 2014, are cited from the WHO review history; the Commission's own reports for those sessions were not read, so the decision numbers and vote counts are not given.
- The date from which the 1991 decision took effect for the parties (180 days after the Secretary-General's communication, under article 2(7)) was not established from a UN document.