Talk:Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs
Discussion page of Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs
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Discussion for: Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs • View • Links • Related changes
Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.
Page scope
Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs covers the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 together with the Protocol of 25 March 1972 that amended it. The Protocol is treated in a section of the article, not on a page of its own. The article is about what the treaty does to cannabis: the definitions of the plant and its parts, the treatment of seeds and leaves, the schedules, cultivation and the hemp exemption, and the phase-out of non-medical use. Opium and coca appear only where a cannabis provision refers to them. The 1971 and 1988 conventions, the control bodies and the national laws that give effect to the treaty have pages of their own.
Data verification
Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Sources
- Treaty text. The provisions are read from the consolidated English text of the Convention as amended in 1972, published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (
convention_1961_en.pdf). The same file prints the Final Acts of the conferences of 1961 and 1972 and the Secretariat's notes, including the list of articles each Protocol article amended. The schedules it prints are the revised schedules in force on 5 March 1990, and it refers readers to the International Narcotics Control Board's "Yellow List" for later ones. The schedule entries of 1961 are therefore cited from the UN Commentary of 1973, and the change of 2020 from the Commission's report. - The 1961 text and the amended text. The Commentary of 1973 (UN Sales No. E.73.XI.1, prepared by the Secretary-General with the assistance of Adolf Lande) prints and discusses the unamended text of 1961. Its article 22 has a single paragraph, which is how the article dates the seize-and-destroy rule of article 22(2) to the Protocol. The article numbers are the same in both texts.
- Reading the Commentary. The UNODC scan of the Commentary has no text layer. It was read through optical character recognition, and every passage quoted on the article was checked against the page image where the recognised text was doubtful (pp. 2, 3, 69, 276, 312–313).
- Status and reservations. Dates, party counts and the article 49 reservations of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Nepal are from the UN Treaty Collection status pages for the 1961 Convention (VI-15), the Protocol (VI-17) and the amended Convention (VI-18), read on 15 October 2026. VI-18 then listed 186 parties.
- 2018–2020. The WHO recommendations are cited from the Director-General's letter of 24 January 2019 to the UN Secretary-General. The votes of 2 December 2020 are cited from the Commission's report on its reconvened sixty-third session (E/2020/28/Add.1), which gives each roll-call vote by name. The UNODC press statement of the same day gives the same figures.
- Bewley-Taylor, Blickman and Jelsma (2014) is a policy report of the Transnational Institute and the Global Drug Policy Observatory. Its judgements on the drafting record and on article 49 are attributed to its authors on the article.
Where the sources disagree
- Date of the Protocol. The UN Treaty Collection heads the Protocol "Geneva, 25 March 1972", and the conference's Final Act is dated 25 March 1972, but the same status page's note says the Protocol "was adopted on 24 March 1972". The article gives 25 March 1972 as the Protocol's date.
- Article 49(2)(f).' The subparagraph names only "cannabis", while article 49(1)(d) lists cannabis, cannabis resin and extracts and tinctures. The Commentary reads (f) as covering all four (p. 470, note 4). The article reports this as the Commentarys reading.
- "Indian hemp" in the 1925 Convention. The Commentary says on p. 2 that the 1925 term covered "the dried tops" of the female plant and, a few lines later, "only the dried or fruiting tops of the female plant". The article says only that the 1925 term was limited to the female plant.
Open points
- When the Schedule IV deletion took effect. Under article 3(7) a scheduling decision takes effect for each party on the date it receives the Secretary-General's communication. The date of that communication was not established from a UN document, so the article gives only the date of the vote. Dates in 2021 given by some websites are not used.
- The 41st report of the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence itself (WHO Technical Report Series) was not read; the recommendations are cited from the Director-General's letter.