The genesis of the decision of today’s 63rd Reconvened Conference on Narcotic Drugs of the UN is certainly due to the perseverance of the international activists of ENCOD, FAAAT and the US Veterans for Safe Access and many other friends who from Mexico to Barcelona raised the cannabis issue and the legitimacy of the past control system which has been highly exaggerated as to cannabis issues.
For the first time, some poor and underprivileged activists of the civil society forced the WHO in Geneva after 5 years of intense work to make up their minds on the therapeutical potentials of the plant. It has been a long trip to stimulate and finally, the experts sent their recommendations to the drug authorities of the UN in Vienna. This long trip is not over yet. But considering it by some aspect quite unrealistic in some corridor discussions at the ENCOD GA in Slovenia, the actual result of 2nd of December 2020 is a real breaking point and a light in the darkness of the past century of cannabis prohibition.
As a matter of fact, the cannabis issue has been buried by a century of ignorance and bigotry starting with the fascist-racist imprinting of the Italian medical delegation at the 1925 meeting of the League of Nations that started to pose the cannabis issue as a threat to the white race throughout all the years where the science achieved seminal results in the cannabis research which were never taken to knowledge hitherto by the state community.
All efforts to reconsider cannabis as to the outdated 1961-1971 Single Convention on narcotic and psychotropic substances were postponed several times and discussed finally today at the 63rd Conference on Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations closing on the 6th of March 2020 and reconvened on 2-4th of December to establish the viability of cannabis in the global pharmacopoeia after the UN treaties in 1961 assessed its forfeiture in the medical applications despite the fact that most cannabis-related scientific the research was still to be done.
Two statements of civil society were sent to the CND, one lead by Encod (Vote Yes) with 195 signatures representing 53 nations stressing the need of the full recognition of the therapeutical potential of the cannabis plant and last but not least, the appeal, subscribed by Forum Droghe of Italy and others like Science for Democracy, that highlighted the importance of science-driven policies on this respect.
As a result, cannabis was taken out of schedule IV with the consent of 27 nations voting yes and 24 against. It is a historical change in the rather elephantine structure of the global drug control mechanism. Cannabis is still considered (mainly for political reasons, as admitted the WHO experts) as dangerous as heroin and fentanyl being left in schedule I. But the result will accelerate society to evaluate the empowerment of just and effective drug policies. The other proposals were rejected like the insert Dronabinol, the non-proprietary name of THC, from schedule II to schedule I. Also, the question of CBD was rejected and similar dispositions on extracts based on THC. There have been countries that rejected those recommendations being rather liberal on cannabis like Canada. Hungary seems out of control and meanwhile so obsessed that they opted against a major restriction of cannabis in schedule I as to pure THC remaining in Schedule II whereas the flowering tops remain notably in Schedule I.
Most probably the latitude of the single nations will grow and accomplishing the declarations of the former Bush and Obama drug czar John Brownfield whose doctrine allows the US to do whatever they might dispose of as to cannabis but tend to oblige the other nations to follow the flawed daily grind of the UN we have just attended today.
In the meanwhile and at the centre of our political agenda a simple and basic slogan:
Freedom to Farm!
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Monitoring the vote on WHO medical cannabis recommendations (V6)
