A love story or international rights and legalization

International rights form the basis of modern nation-states. As far as states are considered civilized, they observe human rights more and not less. Decriminalization continues to leave its mark on the international stage.

Cannabis has been legal for medical use by Canadians since 2001. Also, cannabis has been legal in Canada since October 17, 2018, which is still a godsend for Canadian citizens. For many others in different countries they were unlucky in this regard.

Canada

We in Canada live in one of the few places with legal medical and recreational use of cannabis. For me, this makes Canadian society a more civilized democratic country because it seems to respect an unspoken “human right” without an explicit declaration as a human right. So there is a right to psychological autonomy – not just intellectual. As in, we have the right to freedom of religion and the right to freedom of belief. We can practice religion as we want. We too can believe any way we want.

However, the “psychological autonomy” seems to be more nuanced. The others obviously appear as intellectual forms of freedom of mind. It signifies the right and privilege to use psychoactive substances at your own discretion.
A model of free, prior and informed consent about the substance, including knowledge of the consequences of free psychological actions.

An outlier

Only Canada, Georgia, Mexico, South Africa, Uruguay, 18 states, and a small handful of other places have legalized recreational cannabis use. The United Nations recognizes 193 member states in its General Assembly.

As a result, Canada is one of the few outliers in both medical legalization and recreational cannabis legalization. In most of the rest of the world, cannabis is at least partially illegal.

The three main treaties for its international legal status are the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and the 1988 Convention against Illicit Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. Maybe it’s time for an updated one.

International classifications

Essentially, this international system lists cannabis as a substance or “drug” on List I and, in fact, List IV. This means that according to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, cannabis falls into the same classification as “cocaine, heroin, methadone, morphine, opium”.

Let that sink in, for cannabis users, many of the readers here, possibly. They are categorized in this direction, which at least seems unfair, if not against subjective experience and scientific evidence. With that in mind, Canada appears to be more evidence-based in its decriminalization cannabis policy than most other countries in the world.

This classification of lists – Schedule I, Schedule II, Schedule III, and Schedule IV – for substances is severely out of date. It comes from the appendix of the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971.

Legalization, a love story

Many health authorities in Canada and elsewhere and leaders, including former and current secretaries-general, have called for decriminalization.

A few years ago, the World Health Organization and the United Nations called for it to be removed from the Appendix IV classification, which is at least an easy but sensible step.

Canada, in its evidence-based policy of decriminalization / legalization of cannabis overall since 2018 and as an outlier on the international stage, is a love story about a society that is civilizing itself through democratic efforts.