The Establishment of an International Bureaucracy
The League of Nations assumed responsibility for the Hague Convention in 1920. In 1924 the First Geneva Opium Conference addressed the gradual suppression of opium smoking. This was soon followed by the Second Geneva Opium Conference, which expanded international control over drugs by establishing a system of import and export certificates, creating the Permanent Central Opium Board (PCOB) to oversee the new provisions, and adding coca leaves and cannabis to the list of controlled substances.
The United States, because it did not recognize the League, relinquished leadership of the international movement, and went so far as to walk out of the Second Geneva Opium Conference because, in its view, the other nations were unwilling to take meaningful steps to curb opium production and refused to ban the manufacture of diacetylmorphine, more commonly known by its generic name, heroin. Heroin had been introduced by the Bayer Company in 1898 as a cough suppressant and within two decades had replaced morphine as the drug of choice among youth gangs in New York City. Heroin had an advantage over morphine in that it could be sniffed as well as injected and became the most feared of the opiates in the United States. In 1924 the United States banned domestic production of heroin.In 1931 a conference was held in Geneva on limiting the manufacture of narcotic drugs, and in 1936 another Geneva conference dealt with suppressing the illicit traffic in dangerous drugs. After World War II the United Nations accepted responsibility for narcotics control, and in 1961 the various treaties were combined into the Single Convention on Narcotics. A significant addition to the older treaties was the prohibition of cannabis production.
The United Nations placed drug control under the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs meets annually to review the drug problem and make recommendations on policy to ECOSOC. The commission is the successor to the League’s Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs (1921-40). Also under ECOSOC is the International Narcotic Control Board (INCB), which oversees the ongoing functioning of treaty obligations and provides technical assistance in the form of statistics and chemical analyses. INCB, established by the Single Convention, succeeds the League’s PCOB (1929-67) and the Drug Supervisory Board (1933-67).
The appearance in the 1960s of problems with newer drugs, such as LSD, barbiturates, amphetamines, and tranquilizers, prompted a new treaty, the Convention on Psychotropic Drugs (1971), which aims to expand international supervision beyond the traditional substances linked to opium, coca, and cannabis. In 1988 a convention intended to improve criminal sanctions against international traffickers was submitted to members of the United Nations for ratification.