Narcotics Limitation Convention of 1931

The Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotics Drugs (commonly referred to as the Narcotics Limitation Convention) met in Geneva Switzerland on July 13, 1931. The League of Nations (an intergovernmental organization created because of the Treaty of Versailles in 1920) convened and signed a drug control treaty to place limits on the manufacture of cocaine, heroin, and morphine. This treaty also restricted the legitimate manufacture of narcotic drugs for medical and scientific purposes and limited the quantity of drug imports and exports to each country.

On July 9, 1933, the treaty came into effect, with 40 states as parties (e.g., China, France, Germany, Japan, Turkey, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America). It represented a significant advance in the antidrug campaign, as well as an important milestone in international law and administration. Further, this was the first time the narcotics industry had been subordinated to international regulation, which was not motivated by economic interests, but rather because of higher humanitarian and moral aspirations (i.e., the general desire to reduce drug addiction and its pernicious effects). In addition, by creating policy for an embargo on countries that imported in excess of their requirements, the convention provided the legal framework to impose sanctions against noncooperative countries in an attempt to reduce drug trafficking.

On February 19, 1925, the International Opium Convention was signed in Geneva, Switzerland. This treaty went into effect on September 25, 1928. Delegates from this convention introduced a statistical control system to be supervised by a Permanent Central Opium Board, a body of the League of Nations. This required all parties to submit annual estimates of their import requirements and quarterly statistics of their exports and imports of the controlled narcotic substances.

Unfortunately, this system proved to be inadequate at reducing drug trafficking, because revenue interests by certain countries affected their willingness to suppress raw opium production; as a result, the United States became one of the worst sufferers of illicit drug trafficking among Western countries. This failure to control the production of narcotics acted as the impetus for the United States and other parties to reconvene at the Narcotics Limitations Convention of 1931 and to then implement and impose stricter reforms on current international drug policy.