The Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 is a United Nations treaty designed to control psychoactive drugs such as amphetamine-type stimulants, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, and psychedelics signed in Vienna, Austria on 21 February 1971. The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 did not ban the many newly discovered psychotropics, since its scope was limited to drugs with cannabis, coca and opium-like effects.
During the 1960s, such drugs became widely available, and government authorities opposed this for numerous reasons, arguing that along with negative health effects, drug use led to lowered moral standards. The Convention, which contains import and export restrictions and other rules aimed at limiting drug use to scientific and medical purposes, came into force on 16 August 1976. As of 2013, 183 member states are Parties to the treaty. The treaty is not self-implementing; individual countries must pass domestic laws to enact punishments and restrictions. Though not all scheduled substances are restricted in all signatory countries, many laws have been passed to implement or exceed the requirements of the Convention, including the Canadian Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, the UK Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the U.S. Psychotropic Substances Act. Adolf Lande, under the direction of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, prepared the Commentary on the Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The Commentary, published in 1976, is an aid to interpreting the treaty and constitutes a key part of its legislative history.
Provisions to end the international trafficking of drugs covered by this Convention are contained in the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. This treaty, signed in 1988, regulates precursor chemicals to drugs controlled by the Single Convention and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances. It also strengthens provisions against money laundering and other drug-related crimes. These three UN drug conventions together establish the current international drug control framework.
International drug control began with the First International Opium Convention of 1912, a treaty which adopted import and export restrictions on the opium poppy's psychoactive derivatives. Over the next half-century, several additional treaties were adopted under League of Nations auspices, gradually expanding the list of controlled substances to encompass cocaine and other drugs and granting the Permanent Central Opium Board power to monitor compliance. After the United Nations was formed in 1945, those enforcement functions passed to the UN.
In 1961, a conference of plenipotentiaries in New York adopted the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which consolidated the existing drug control treaties into one document and added cannabis to the list of prohibited plants. In order to appease the pharmaceutical interests, the Single Convention's scope was sharply limited to the list of drugs enumerated in the Schedules annexed to the treaty and to those drugs determined to have similar effects.
During the 1960s, drug use increased in Western developed nations. Young people began using hallucinogenic, stimulant, and other drugs on a widespread scale that has continued to the present. In many jurisdictions, police had no laws under which to prosecute users and traffickers of these new drugs; LSD, for instance, was not prohibited federally in the U.S. until 1967.
In 1968, "[d]eeply concerned at reports of serious damage to health being caused by LSD and similar hallucinogenic substances", the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) passed a resolution calling on nations to limit the use of such drugs to scientific and medical purposes and to impose import and export restrictions. Later that year, the UN General Assembly requested that ECOSOC call upon its Commission on Narcotic Drugs to "give urgent attention to the problem of the abuse of the psychotropic substances not yet under international control, including the possibility of placing such substances under international control".
Circa 1969, with use of stimulants growing, ECOSOC noted with considerable consternation that the Commission "was unable to reach agreement on the applicability of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961 to these substances". The language of the Single Convention and its legislative history precluded any interpretation that would allow international regulation of these drugs under that treaty. A new convention, with a broader scope, would be required in order to bring those substances under control. Using the Single Convention as a template, the Commission prepared a draft convention which was forwarded to all UN member states. The Secretary-General of the United Nations scheduled a conference for early 1971 to finalize the treaty.
Meanwhile, countries had already begun passing legislation to implement the draft treaty. In 1969, Canada added Part IV to its Food and Drugs Act, placing a set of "restricted substances", including LSD, DMT, and MDA, under federal control. In 1970, the United States completely revamped its existing drug control laws by enacting the Controlled Substances Act (amended in 1978 by the Psychotropic Substances Act, which allows the U.S. drug control Schedules to be updated as needed to comply with the Convention). In 1971, the United Kingdom passed the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. A host of other nations followed suit. A common feature shared by most implementing legislation is the establishment of several classes or Schedules of controlled substances, similarly to the Single Convention and the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, so that compliance with international law can be assured simply by placing a drug into the appropriate Schedule.
The conference convened on 11 January 1971. Nations split into two rival factions, based on their interests. According to a Senate of Canada report, "One group included mostly developed nations with powerful pharmaceutical industries and active psychotropics markets ... The other group consisted of developing states ... with few psychotropic manufacturing facilities". The organic drug-making states that had suffered economically from the Single Convention's restrictions on cannabis, coca, and opium fought for tough regulations on synthetic drugs. The synthetic drug-producing states opposed those restrictions. Ultimately, the developing states' lobbying power was no match for the powerful pharmaceutical industry's, and the international regulations that emerged at the conference's close on 21 February were considerably weaker than those of the Single Convention.
The Convention's adoption marked a major milestone in the development of the global drug control regime. Over 59 years, the system had evolved from a set of loose controls focused on a single drug into a comprehensive regulatory framework capable of encompassing almost any mind-altering substance imaginable. According to Rufus King, "It covers such a grab-bag of natural and manufactured items that at every stage of its consideration its proponents felt obliged to stress anew that it would not affect alcohol or tobacco abuse."
As of February 2018, there are 184 state parties to the convention. This total includes 182 member states of the United Nations, the Holy See and the State of Palestine. The 11 UN member states that are not party to the convention are East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Haiti, Kiribati, Liberia, Nauru, Samoa, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Liberia has signed the treaty but has not ratified it.
Schedules of controlled substances
The list of Schedules and the substances presently therein can be found on the International Narcotics Control Board's website.
The Convention has four Schedules of controlled substances, ranging from Schedule I (most restrictive) to Schedule IV (least restrictive). A list of psychotropic substances, and their corresponding Schedules, was annexed to the 1971 treaty. The text of the Convention does not contain a formal description of the features of the substances fitting in each Schedule, in contrast to the US Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which gave specific criteria for each Schedule in the US system. The amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), a legal class of stimulants – not all of which are substituted amphetamines – were defined in the 1971 treaty and in subsequent revisions. A 2002 European Parliament report and a 1996 UNODC report on ATS describe the international Schedules as listed below.