It is the task of the United Nations to supervise and co-ordinate the rules laid down by the three international Conventions on drugs. The Vienna-based United Nations International Drug Control Program (UNDCP) is operative as of March 1991, and it combines the competences of three bodies that were previously separated: the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations Economic and Social Council, created in 1946 with the purpose of providing political guidelines in the sector; the International Narcotics Control Board, formed by a group of experts and created in 1961 with the task of surveying the phenomenon's global trend; the United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control (UNFDAC), established in 1971 with the task of counseling the governments in the struggle against the production, traffic and abuse of drugs.

There is also an Expert Committee on Narcotic Drugs as part of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology of the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO is charged by the Single Convention and by the Convention on Psychotropic Substances with supplying a judgement on the psychoactive substances, in the sense that this organization may suggest the inclusion of new substances in the charts, shifting them from one chart to the other, or removing them - an event which has never occurred.

The UNDCP has a yearly budget, based on voluntary contributions, of about $70 million. Italy is traditionally one of the main sponsors of UNFDAC first and now also of the UNDCP, and, as far as we know, has covered almost half of the 1992 budget (11). This should account for the fact that many Italians have been directors of this agency: Giorgio Giacomelli, current director of the UNDCP, succeeded to Giuseppe Di Gennaro, previously head of the UNFDAC.

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(11) Cf. Marcello D'Angelo, "Droga e riciclaggio ormai straripano sull'intero pianeta", Il Giorno, 13 April 1992; Ernesto Ugo Savona, "Nasce un nuovo organismo delle Nazioni Unite", Cooperazione, January 1991.