Bulletin on Narcotics

Bulletin on Narcotics

Publication

Author	United Nations Secretariat
Language	English and French at first; all six official languages of the United Nations by 2002
Published	From October 1949; vol. LXII (2019) printed in 2020
Publisher	United Nations: Department of Social Affairs (1949–1956); Division of Narcotic Drugs (from 1956); later the United Nations International Drug Control Programme and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
Place	Geneva; New York; Vienna
Volumes	62 (vol. I, 1949, to vol. LXII, 2019)

Cannabis Content

Volume	Vol. II, no. 4 (1950) and vol. III, no. 1 (1951), Bouquet's survey; 1985, no. 4, and vols. XLIX–L (1997/1998), cannabis issues; vol. LVIII (2006), Review of the world cannabis situation
Regions documented	India; Xinjiang; Egypt; Brazil; South Africa; Nigeria; Morocco
Preparations	charas; hashish; ganja; bhang
Uses documented	Medicinal; non-medical use, which the Bulletin calls "abuse"; fibre and seed hemp
Taxonomic significance	Ernest Small's 1975 article on the species question in American cannabis law

Access

Digital facsimile	View the archive at UNODC
Original held at	Wellcome Collection, London (print run); every issue online at UNODC

The Bulletin on Narcotics is a journal of the United Nations on the control of narcotic drugs. The UN Secretariat began it in October 1949. Since 2002 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has published it.^{: title verso} It carries technical and scientific articles, reports on national law and administration and accounts of the international control bodies' work. Its cannabis papers include a two-part survey by R. J. Bouquet (1950–1951), country reports, laboratory studies and whole issues on cannabis in 1985, 1997–1998 and 2006.^: iii

As the journal of the international drug-control secretariat, the Bulletin is evidence of how that system described cannabis and argued for its control, as much as it documents the plant and its use.

The 1950s articles speak of Indian hemp and the hemp drugs. The 1985 editorial note speaks of cannabis abuse for any non-medical use.

Origins

The Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the Economic and Social Council decided that authoritative information on drug control should go out in a bulletin published by the UN Secretariat. The General Assembly upheld the decision. The first number placed the journal in a line of international control running from the Shanghai meeting of 1909 to the Paris Protocol of 1948, a line the UN had inherited from the League of Nations.

The first number also set out what the Bulletin was to do: report the latest results of governments, the UN and the treaty bodies in the control of narcotic drugs and "the struggle against addiction"; carry technical and scientific articles, articles on national legislation and administration and bibliography; and follow the preparatory work on a single convention to replace the eight existing international instruments. That convention was adopted in 1961 as the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. The Secretariat planned four numbers a year, each arranged in four sections: International, Technical, Official and Bibliography. The 1949 volume was a single number, dated October 1949. Its articles dealt with international control, opium and the coca leaf.

Publishers and editing

The UN Department of Social Affairs issued the Bulletin from October 1949 to the July–September number of 1956. The Division of Narcotic Drugs issued it from the October–December number of 1956. The double issue for 1997 and 1998 appeared in 1999 under the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP).^: iii The Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention became UNODC on 1 October 2002. UNODC includes the UNDCP.^{: title verso}

The early numbers came out in English and French, with selected articles in Spanish and Russian. By 2002 the Bulletin was printed in all six official languages of the UN: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.^: iii

The volumes of 2002, 2008 and 2017 print a statement of editorial policy. The Editor invited individuals and organisations to submit original scholarly work on drug control, of "relatively high professional calibre" for a United Nations technical publication. Contributors were asked to "exclude any critical judgement of a particular national or regional situation". Signed articles gave their authors' views, not necessarily the Secretariat's.^{: iii–iv: iv: iv} Volumes from 2002 had guest editors: Zili Sloboda for the two volumes on drug-abuse epidemiology (2002 and 2003), Martin Bouchard of Simon Fraser University for vol. LX, Jorrit Kamminga for vol. LXI and Isidore Obot of the University of Uyo for vol. LXII.^{: iii: iii: iii: iii} Sandeep Chawla was Editor of vol. LX and Angela Me of vol. LXII.^{: title verso: title verso}

Volumes are numbered from vol. I (1949); Bouquet's 1951 article refers back to "vol. II, No. 4, October 1950". UNODC's archive lists up to four issues a year from 1950. From 1999 to 2008 each volume appeared as one double issue (Nos. 1 and 2). A volume kept its nominal year even when it appeared late; vol. LVII is dated 2005 "for the sake of continuity". Vol. LX, dated 2008, was printed in New York in 2011 and carries papers from a conference held in Vienna in March 2009.^{: title page} Vol. LXI (2017) and vol. LXII (2019) were printed in Vienna in 2018 and 2020.^{: title page: title page} UNODC hosts every issue from vol. I, no. 1.^: iv

Cannabis in the Bulletin

The Bulletin published on cannabis from 1950. Its papers include a survey of the plant and its use (1950–1951) and country reports from India, Egypt, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa and Asia. Laboratory studies of the plant's chemistry and origin followed from the 1960s. Whole issues were given over to cannabis in 1985, 1997–1998 and 2006.

Surveys and the Single Convention, 1950–1962

P. Duquénois of the Strasbourg faculty described the chemical and physiological tests used in France to identify Indian hemp in 1950. Bouquet's article "Cannabis" followed in two parts: the introduction and parts I and II in October 1950 and the concluding part, which opens on intoxication, in 1951. Bouquet had sat on the sub-committee on cannabis that the League of Nations set up in the 1930s. The Division of Narcotic Drugs contacted him in 1949–1950, when its progress report regretted that it had not been able to give cannabis studies as much attention as it wished. His 1951 part faulted earlier studies of intoxication for using "a few subjects of a high intellectual level who are members of advanced civilizations". In his view their findings did not describe "the mass of low-class addicts having little or no education".

An unsigned note of 1953, "The surprising extinction of the charas traffic", followed charas from Xinjiang (Sinkiang) to India. The note said the trade had centred on Yarkand, that the Government of India had once allowed 70,000 kg a year to be imported and that the Sinkiang provincial government had ended the traffic, largely during the war years. It called charas "generally considered the worst and most addiction-forming of the hemp drugs". Roberval Cordeiro de Farias wrote on maconha in Brazil and its control by health and police authorities in 1955. The pharmacologist I. C. Chopra and R. N. Chopra wrote on India in 1957. R. N. Chopra was then director of the Drug Research Laboratory of Jammu and Kashmir. Their chapters run from production and preparations through cannabis in Indian indigenous medicine and habitual use to control. They treated the Indian plant as Cannabis sativa, to which C. indica had been reduced.

In 1956 G. Bredemann, Fr. Schwanitz and R. von Sengbusch of Hamburg held that even hemp grown for fibre could yield enough resin to be misused. In their view only varieties with little or no hashish would remove the danger. They reported trials on about 20,000 plants in the winter of 1954–1955 and expected the breeding to take 10 to 15 years.

The Secretariat's 1962 note "The cannabis problem" set world seizures of cannabis drugs, taken from governments' incomplete annual reports, at 23,000 kg in 1934 and 832,000 kg in 1960. It said the rise could not be definitely split between better enforcement and reporting on one side and more consumption and traffic on the other. Its last sections dealt with the drafts of the Single Convention and with the treaty as adopted in 1961, which placed cannabis and cannabis resin in its schedule I.

Country reports, 1961–1977

J. M. Watt wrote on dagga in South Africa in 1961. He derived the name from a Khoekhoe word, dacha. The name also covers species of Leonotis, always with a qualifier such as wildedagga. In 1963 H. B. M. Murphy reviewed the psychiatric literature on cannabis. T. Asuni's report on cannabis in Nigeria followed in 1964, and the physician Joel Fort surveyed drug use in Asia in 1965. The same year Col. A. Ahmed El Hadka reviewed 40 years of Egypt's campaign against narcotic drugs. He called hashish and opium the "black" drugs, which "continue to baffle all Egyptian efforts".

In 1977 Jack Fletcher and Paul Satz of the University of Florida criticised the sampling and psychometrics of the Egyptian study of chronic hashish users. M. I. Soueif of Cairo University replied in the same issue.

Laboratory work and the plant, 1967–1985

G. Joachimoglu, J. Kiburis and C. Miras of the University of Athens reported studies in 1967 with the UN cannabis reference sample, a stable preparation against which the potency of hashish samples could be compared. In 1972 the Bulletin printed excerpts from a report of a World Health Organization scientific group, which recognised a single species, C. sativa.

Ernest Small wrote in 1975 on "the species problem" in United States law. Defendants were arguing that their material came from C. indica or C. ruderalis, while the statutes named C. sativa. Small and Arthur Cronquist had testified for the state; Richard Evans Schultes had testified for the defence in dozens of cases. C. E. Turner and colleagues compared the cannabinoid content of Mexican variants grown in Mexico and in Mississippi in 1982. From 1982 P. B. Baker, T. A. Gough and B. J. Taylor reported on plants grown in the United Kingdom from seeds of known origin, a series that reached its third and fourth generations in 1985.

The fourth issue of 1985 was a special issue on cannabis research. Its editorial note called cannabis "the most widely abused illicit drug in the world", asserted that "evidence clearly shows" harm to health and cited the Economic and Social Council's resolution 1984/22 on the cannabis problem. The issue included Gabriel Nahas's critique of Ganja in Jamaica (1975) and a report by staff of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on cannabis traffic in Canada.

Review issues, 1997–2006

The double issue on cannabis for 1997 and 1998, published in 1999, set out recent research.^: iii K. Szendrei described fibre hemp bred to ever lower THC levels, clandestine breeding of types very high in THC and the spread of indoor cultivation in North America and Europe. G. Mignoni wrote on the revival of licit hemp in Europe. The UNDCP's Research Section estimated that about 140 million people, 2.5 per cent of the world's population, used cannabis in a year.

The 2005 volume, on laboratory science in drug control, included a study of THC in 245 samples from 30 plots in three provinces of northern Morocco, carried out by the forensic laboratory of the Gendarmerie Royale. The study found higher THC in the traditional growing areas of Al Hoceima and Chefchaouen than in Larache, where cultivation was recent.

Vol. LVIII, dated 2006 and printed in 2008, was a Review of the world cannabis situation. Its preface called the cannabis market "little understood and under documented". The review drew on grey literature to fill that gap. Ted Leggett of UNODC's Research and Analysis Section did the research, part of which responded to the General Assembly's request of 2004 for a global market survey on cannabis. A shorter version appeared in the World Drug Report 2006.^: iii

Reception and historiography

The excerpts of the WHO scientific group's report printed in 1972 cite Bouquet (1950) for the plant's probable origin in Central Asia. The historian James H. Mills found that cannabis "remained largely neglected at the United Nations in its early years". He quoted the Division's 1949–1950 progress report on that lack of attention. In his account a WHO statement on the effects of cannabis referred its readers to Bouquet's publications.

See also

• Charas
• Commission on Narcotic Drugs
• Egypt
• Ganja in Jamaica (1975)
• Hashish
• History of cannabis in the Philippines
• International Narcotics Control Board
• Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs
• Thai stick
• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

References

India Xinjiang Egypt Brazil South Africa Nigeria Morocco Charas Hashish Ganja Bhang Medicinal Recreational Fibre Periodical Intergovernmental journal