Talk:United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances
Discussion page of United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances
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Discussion for: United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances • View • Links • Related changes
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Page scope
United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances covers the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988. The article is about what the treaty does to cannabis: the definition of the cannabis plant, cultivation as a trafficking offence, possession, purchase and cultivation for personal consumption, and the eradication of illicit cultivation with its clause on traditional licit uses and the environment. Money laundering, extradition, mutual legal assistance, controlled delivery, precursor chemicals and trafficking by sea appear only where they bear on those provisions. The 1961 and 1971 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 English text published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (
convention_1988_en.pdf), which also prints the Final Act of the conference, its three resolutions and the annexed Tables I and II as revised to 23 November 1992. The certified text is in the United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 1582, p. 95. - The Commentary. The UN Commentary of 1998 (E/CN.7/590, Sales No. E.98.XI.5) was prepared at the request of the Economic and Social Council (resolution 1993/42). Its foreword names four principal drafters: Henri Mazaud, John F. Scott, William C. Gilmore and David McClean. The article cites it under the Secretary-General, at whose request it was written. Page numbers are the printed ones. The UNODC scan has no text layer and was read through optical character recognition. Every passage quoted on the article was compared with the recognised text, and the doubtful ones with the page image.
- Status and reservations. Dates, the party count and the reservations and declarations of Bolivia, Colombia, the Netherlands, Peru and Switzerland are from the UN Treaty Collection status page (Chapter VI, 19), read on 15 October 2026. It then listed 87 signatories and 192 parties.
- Bewley-Taylor, Blickman and Jelsma (2014) is a policy report of the Transnational Institute and the Global Drug Policy Observatory. Its account of the Convention's origins is attributed to its authors on the article.
Where the sources disagree
- Date of adoption. The UN Treaty Collection heads the Convention "Vienna, 20 December 1988", and the Convention itself is dated as done at Vienna on the twentieth day of December 1988. The Final Act (para. 21) and the Commentary (pp. 11, 25) say the conference adopted it on 19 December 1988 and opened it for signature on 20 December. The infobox gives 19 December 1988 as the date of adoption.
Open points
- Species of the genus.' The Commentary (p. 29) says the genus Cannabis consists of the single species Cannabis sativa L. The article reports it as the Commentarys statement, not in the wiki's voice. The treaty's own definition, "any plant of the genus Cannabis", does not depend on it.
- The official records of the 1988 conference were not read. The drafting history on the article comes from the Final Act and the Commentary, which cites those records.
- The report of the Expert Group Meeting on Environmentally Safe Methods for the Eradication of Illicit Narcotic Plants (Vienna, December 1989), which the Commentary cites on eradication methods, was not read.