Human rights, public health and medicinal cannabis use (original) (raw)
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The Legalization of Medical Marijuana: A Human Rights Law Perspective
Human Rights in the Global South (HRGS)
The discourse on legalizing marijuana for medical purposes in Indonesia peaked when legislators discussed the draft law on the narcotics law amendment. Efforts to legalize marijuana for medical purposes have also been pursued by testing the narcotics law. However, through decision number 106/PUU-XVII/2020, the Constitutional Court prohibited medical marijuana as a medical treatment. From the Human Rights perspective, everyone has the right to life and health. Therefore, in society's logic, the prohibition of using marijuana for medical treatment is the same as forbidding sick people to stay alive. It means that the state has failed to guarantee its citizens' lives. But on the other hand, several countries legalized medical marijuana, such as Thailand, Turkey, Lebanon, Netherlands, and Spain. So, why is Indonesia still banning the use of medical marijuana? This research tries to find the legal reasoning of Indonesia's government in the medical marijuana case. These proble...
International Journal of Drug Policy, 2017
Several jurisdictions around the world have introduced policies and laws allowing for the legal use of cannabis for therapeutic purposes. However, there has been little critical discussion of how the object of 'medicinal cannabis' is enacted in policy and practice. Informed by Carol Bacchi's poststructuralist approach to policy analysis and the work of science and technology studies scholars, this paper seeks to problematise the object of 'medicinal cannabis' and examine how it is constituted through governing practices. In particular, we consider how the making of the object of 'medicinal cannabis' might constrain or enact discourses of pleasure. As a case example, we take the Victorian Law Reform Commission's review of law reform options to allow people in the Australian state of Victoria to be treated with medicinal cannabis. Through analysis of this case example, we find that although 'medicinal cannabis' is constituted as a thoroughly medical object, it is also constituted as unique. We argue that medicinal cannabis is enacted in part through the production of another object (so-called 'recreational cannabis') and the social and political meanings attached to both. Although both 'substances' are constituted as distinct, 'medicinal cannabis' relies on the 'absent presence' of 'recreational cannabis' to define and shape what it is. However, we find that contained within this rendering of 'medicinal cannabis' are complex enactments of health and wellbeing, which open up discourses of pleasure. 'Medicinal cannabis' appears to challenge the idea that the effects of 'medicine' cannot be understood in terms of pleasure. As such, the making of 'medicinal cannabis' as a medical object, and its invocation of broad notions of health and wellbeing, expand the ways in which drug effects can be acknowledged, including pleasurable and desirable effects, helping us to think differently about both medicine and other forms of drug use.
Human Rights Quarterly, 2011
A recent article in this journal challenged claims that a human rights framework should be applied to drug control. This article questions the author's assertions and reframes them in the context of socio-legal drug scholarship, aiming to build on the discourse concerning human rights and drug use. It is submitted that a rights-based approach is a necessary, indeed obligatory, ethical and legal framework through which to address drug use and that international human rights law provides the proper scope for determining where interferences with individual human rights might be justified on certain, limited grounds.
Prescribing cannabis: freedom, autonomy, and values
Journal of Medical Ethics, 2004
In many Western jurisdictions cannabis, unlike most other psychoactive drugs, cannot be prescribed to patients even in cases where medical professionals believe that it would ease the patient's pain or anxiety. The reasons for this prohibition are mostly ideological, although medical and moral arguments have been formulated to support it. In this paper, it is argued that freedom, properly understood, provides a sound ethical reason to allow the use of cannabis in medicine. Scientific facts, appeals to harm and autonomy, and considerations of symbolic value cannot consistently justify prohibitions.
The right to use drugs: considerations for more humane societies
The UN World Drug Report 2022 estimates that in 2020, 5.6% of the global population used an illicit substance. On the other side of the spectrum, various countries continue to enact different legislative changes to decriminalise and regulate drug use. This paper aims to bring to the fore proposals by Van Ree (1999) and Stevens (2011) in advancing a human rights framework for drug use in society.
More harm than good? Cannabis, harm and the misuse of drugs act
Drugs and Alcohol Today, 2021
Purpose This paper aims to consider the nature of cannabis-related harms under the UK’s Misuse of Drugs Act (MDA). Written for the specific context of this four-paper special section on 50 years of the MDA, it argues that the MDA may cause more harm than it prevents. Design/methodology/approach An opinion piece offering a structured overview of cannabis-related harms under prohibition. It summarises existing evidence of the ways in which prohibition may exacerbate existing – and create new – harms related to the production, distribution, use and control of cannabis. Findings The paper argues that prohibition of cannabis under the MDA may cause more harm than it prevents. Originality/value It has long been argued that the MDA does not accurately or fairly reflect the harms of the substances it prohibits, and much existing research points to different ways in which drug prohibition can itself be harmful. The originality of this paper lies in bringing together these arguments and devel...
Drugs Obscure the Human Rights Issues for Drug Users
D rug users as a population can be viewed as vulnerable as a result of their illegal, and therefore criminal, drug use and resultant lifestyle. The view that drug users are entitled to the same human rights as the general population is a relatively new concept that has grown out of and around the development of harm reduction interventions that address the needs of drug users from a non-judgemental perspective that focus' on reducing drug-related harms and not the legality of drug use. This paper will seek to address the question of whether drug users in the Caribbean, and by extension all drug users, are rights holders. To accomplish this we will explore the current status of drug users in the Caribbean, their vulnerability to HIV and how the international conventions and laws prohibiting drug use dramatically increase the vulnerability of drug users to HIV and social exclusion. We will start a short discourse on vulnerability and how prohibitionist legislation creates a greater vulnerability than the behaviour it prohibits, a discussion of drug use (primarily non-injecting crack cocaine use) and HIV risk in the context of the Commonwealth Caribbean and an outline of the international drug conventions and how the Caribbean's wholesale acceptance of these conventions place drug users at increased risk. Vulnerability is viewed as a result of complex economic, social and cultural drivers of the epidemic. The author contends that the state needs to be added to that list as the creator of legislation that tramples, rather than protects, human rights. Examples of laws that are guilty of creating or increasing vulnerability include:
Criminalisation of Cannabis Vis-À-Vis Liberty
2021
The article intends to examine, with the help of doctrinal method, the utility of India’s strict penal policies against cannabis in the light of various contemporary issues. India Criminalized cannabis under Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 pursuant it’s international commitment as a signatory to three United Nation’s drug conventions. The primary objective behind criminalization was to reduce the incidences of drug abuse. But the experience from the past few decades has been that such law is producing more harm than it actually prevents. Criminalization of cannabis not only violates individual’s right to autonomy and self determination but also creates numerous other issues like increasing the incidences of incarceration, economic stress on the legal system, hindrance to medical research, etc.