However, rather than precipitating the global circulation of new models of cannabis-liberalization reform, this early crisis stimulated new cycles of recursive transnational lawmaking, leading to the entrenchment of the prohibitionist approach. In the US, calls to reintroduce tougher drug laws resonated with the wider conservative offensive against the putative “soft on crime” inclinations of liberal policymakers in the post-civil rights era. Opponents of legalization sought to challenge the public health frame that gained increasing influence in the wake of the Shafer Commission’s Report and to contextualize the issue of cannabis use as yet another symptom of a putative law and order crisis in American cities. The proliferation of grassroots parents’ movements lobbying for the stricter regulation of marijuana provided considerable political momentum for the introduction of tougher penalties for trafficking and possession offenses. The process by which cannabis prohibition norms again became settled at the national level in the US provided facilitative conditions for the increasing involvement of the federal government in exporting its drug policies to other countries. This effort became increasingly consequential in an historical moment in which the US came to perceive itself “not just as a powerful state operating in a world of anarchy” but as “a producer of world order.” With the end of the Cold War, new discourses of “securitization” emerged as part of the search for a new way of grounding America’s internationalist engagement. Drug policy became increasingly aligned with national security issues pertaining to the activities of insurgent and terrorist groups in Latin American countries and to the risks posed by these groups to the democratic stability and peace in the region.

This new frame of diagnosing the implications of the illegal drug trade led to the development of new modes of defining the goals of US counternarcotic policies as well as the strategies through which such goals should be pursued. These new strategies have sought to reduce drug production at the source, to combat drug trafficking en route to US borders, dry racking to dismantle international illicit drug networks, to reduce drug demand at home and abroad, and to incentivize foreign governments to cooperate with US counternarcotic goals. The institutionalization of these strategies necessitated strengthening the capacity of the US government to influence the drug policies of other countries and to dominate the transnational agenda of cannabis control. From the mid-1980s onwards, the US government institutionalized an array of multilateral, bilateral, and unilateral measures intended to coerce, induce, and socialize other countries to cooperate with its counternarcotic strategies. Its multilateral efforts have largely been based on the extensive funding and support of international and regional organizations that are committed to the prohibitionist approach. In this context, the US has consistently pushed for an expansion of the International Narcotic Control Board’s monitoring authority and has served as a staunchest defender of its prohibitionist policies.38Building on and expanding the scope of the international obligations enshrined in the Vienna Convention and the INCB recommendations, the US has made extensive use of bilateral treaties to create an issue-linkage between states’ willingness to adopt zero-tolerance models of drug policy and their eligibility for foreign aid. Over the next decades, such bilateral agreements provided a basis for the operation of extensive cooperation and capacity-building projects in countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Ghana, Thailand, and many others. Along with these multilateral and bilateral instruments used to influence the drug policies of other countries, the US government has had an extensive reliance on unilateral tools of imposing economic and reputational sanctions on non-compliant states. In 1986, Congress introduced the Omnibus Drug Enforcement, Education, and Control Act, which created a certification process fordrug-producing and drug-transit countries. 

The certification process requires the president to withdraw financial assistance and support in multilateral lending institutions from countries that fail to comply with requisite benchmarks of antidrug policy. To enable congressional deliberations over such sanctions, the US Department of State submits an annual International Narcotic Control Strategy Report that identifies the major illicit drug-producing and drug-transit countries and evaluates the extent to which their domestic policies are in compliance with the US counternarcotic agenda. The INCSR narrative explores a wide range of countries . The certification process is applied to countries included in what came to be known as the Majors List . The success of the US to coerce and to induce dozens of countries to adopt its preferred models of implementing cannabis prohibitions promoted convergence of drug laws across jurisdictions and thus increased the degree of concordance between the transnational and the national levels of this TLO. However, the global diffusion of tougher cannabis laws cannot be sufficiently explained by focusing on the coercive mechanisms employed by the US alone. This diffusion was also a product of broader social transformations stimulating increasing political mobilization around law and order issues during the final decades of the twentieth century. Illustrating Durkheim’s observation that societies have a functional need to construct categories of deviance, the instigation of moral panics concerning drug abuse epidemics provide a useful tool of identifying “suitable enemies” and scoring political points. In an era during which a broader shift from welfare oriented to punitive-focused approaches to governing social marginality took place, strengthening state capacities to condemn and to penalize drug dealers and users proved to be a far more attractive project for politicians than undertaking to address the public health implications of drug use.

As the primary international organization responsible for monitoring the implementation of the UN drug conventions, the INCB played an important role in facilitating the concordance between the transnational and national levels of the cannabis prohibition TLO. In its annual reports, the INCB has repeatedly supported the “gateway drug thesis,” according to which the use of cannabis serves as a risk factor in increasing the user’s probability of using harder illicit substances, such as amphetamine, cocaine, or heroin. Based on this thesis , the Board’s 1983 Report criticized those “circles in certain countries” that “apparently assume that to permit unrestricted use of some drug, regarded by them as less harmful, would permit better control of other drugs which they deem more perilous to health.” This criticism was leveled at supporters of the separation of markets strategy, which came to be endorsed by Dutch policymakers at the time. In its later reports throughout the 1980s and 90s, the Board adopted an increasingly critical stance toward the Dutch attempts to depenalize cannabis usage. In its 1997 Report, the selling of cannabis in coffee shops was depicted as “an activity that might be described as indirect incitement.” The focus on the Netherlands and its singling out for disapprobation reflects the rarity of open contestations of the prohibitionist imperatives enforced by the Board during that period.The extensive institutionalization of the cannabis prohibition TLO throughout the 1980s and 1990s facilitated the international spread of tougher laws, severer penalties, and more aggressive policing strategies. However, the very success of this TLO to propagate its policy models highlighted its failure to deliver on its own promise to reduce the prevalence of cannabis use and to eliminate its illicit supply chains. The intensification of enforcement activities also brought into focus the adverse human rights impacts of implementing the prohibitionist cannabis policies. The increasing criticisms of the failures and boomerang effects of the cannabis prohibition TLO prompted both internal and external processes that eroded its legitimacy and compromised its ability to continue guiding the practices of legal actors at the national and local levels. From the early stages of the institutionalization of the cannabis prohibition TLO, it became vulnerable to criticism of its inherent input legitimacy deficiencies. As discussed earlier, the central role played by the US in shaping the goals and strategies of this TLO has largely depended on the exercise of unilateral measures of coercion and inducement. The degree to which the certification process has realized basic standards of transparency, inclusiveness, cannabis curing and accountability is obviously limited. The procedures by which the INCB defines and applies its compliance criteria seem conspicuously insulated from ongoing public debates regarding the impact of cannabis prohibition laws on marginalized populations. These legitimacy deficits are conveniently set aside by proponents of the war on drugs, who tend to focus more on the ability of these measures to promote global public goods than on the quality of the processes through which these measures are created.

As Niko Krisch observes, such tendency to prioritize output legitimacy considerations is pronounced in various contexts of global governance and often produces pressure to move toward more informal and hierarchical modes of transnational governance in these issue-areas. However, this view is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain in the issue-area of cannabis policy given the mounting evidence on the failure of this TLO to achieve its regulatory goals. Despite billions of dollars of investment and extensive law enforcement resources, a sizable body of scholarship has documented the growing availability of the drug during the 1990s, the widespread prevalence of its usage among adolescents, and the increasingly tolerant attitudes toward cannabis consumption among both users and non-users. Drawing analogies to the failure of the “Noble Experiment” of the alcohol prohibition period, criminologists developed thorough critiques of the underlying assumptions of the cannabis prohibition TLO. The assumption that the availability of cannabis can be meaningfully reduced by the deployment of militarized policing strategies has been criticized for overlooking the resilience of cannabis markets and their high levels of adaptability to changes in their regulatory environments. Studies have shown that rather than eliminating supply chains, such interventions served to disperse, displace, and fragment supply sources and distribution routes. In turn, such interventions precipitated a spillover of armed violence to new geographical areas and exposed otherwise uninvolved indigenous populations to new risks and insecurities. The inherent flaws of this dimension of the cannabis prohibition TLO are often illustrated by referencing the “balloon effect” metaphor, depicting the ways in which efforts to suppress the cultivation of cannabis in one geographical area causes a convenient shift of its production elsewhere. The legitimacy of the cannabis prohibition TLO has also been damaged by evidence regarding the immense human rights violations that the implementation of war on drugs policies has entailed. Advocacy networks led by prominent transnational NGOs, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have exposed the disproportionate punishments imposed under the banner of the war on drugs in various countries. In the US, such criticism focused on the contribution of marijuana prohibitions to the nation’s internationally unparalleled incarceration rates and its distinctive patterns of racially-skewed law enforcement. A recent ACLU report using data extracted from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program indicates that between 2001 and 2010, there were over eight million marijuana arrests in the US, of which 88% were for marijuana possession. In 2010, there were more than 20,000 people incarcerated for the sole charge of cannabis possession. Outside of the US, human rights activists focused on the increasing use of capital punishments for drug offenses from the late 1980s onward, as part of the broader escalation of enforcement efforts during the war on drugs era. In China, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the death penalty is exercised regularly for cannabis trafficking offenses. By the mid-1990s, the criticism leveled at the cannabis prohibition TLO began to stimulate increasing advocacy activity in favor of reform. These activities failed to change the direction of drug policy making at the international level. Indeed, the “outcome document” issued in the wake of the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session on drugs kept in place the existing framework of cannabis prohibition and did not endorse the calls to reclassify cannabis as a less dangerous drug. However, the criticism of the prohibitionist approach had a considerable transformative impact on the development of drug policies at the national and subnational levels. Before long, the diffusion of liberal cannabis policies across national borders began to jeopardize the normative settlements institutionalized by the cannabis prohibition TLO in previous decades. The efforts to liberalize cannabis regulations have focused on three distinct models of reform: depenalization, decriminalization, and legalization. Under formal depenalization regimes, the possession of cannabis is still formally prohibited; however, such prohibitions are enforced through intermediate justice measures rather than through conventional penal sanctions such as incarceration.