Palavras-chave: Cânabis. Política de drogas. Teoria de regimes internacionais. Movimentos sociais. Comunidades epistêmicas. Ciclo de políticas públicas. SUMMARY 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 A brief overview of the argument 1.2. Challenging the international law 2. INTERNATIONAL DRUG CONTROL REGIME: HISTORY, INSTITUTIONS AND THEORETICAL APPROACHES 2.1 Drugs: from commodities to evildoers 2.1.1 Transnational moral entrepreneurs and US foreign policy 2.1.2 The Versailles Treaty as a coercive tool for adherence 2.1.3 US hegemony and cannabis criminalization 2.1.2.1 Cannabis in the US before the IDCR 2.2 Treaties, institutions and norms 2.2.1 The 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 2.2.2 The 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances 2.2.3 The 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychoactive Substances 2.3 Quasi-universal ratification: how "vice would pay homage to virtue" 2.3.1 The lack of a sanction system and the US unilateral certification 3. REGIME'S INTRUSIVENESS AND DOMESTIC IMPACT: EXTERNALITIES COLLECTIVE ACTION AND DEFECTION 3.1 Cost-Effectiveness 3.2 Epistemic communities, social movements organizations and transnational advocacy networks 3.2.1 Social movement organizations and drugs political problems 3.2.2 Cannabis legalization movements in the US and legalization and regulation of medical marijuana 3.2.2.1 Medical marijuana regulation in the US 9 3.2.2 Transnational advocacy networks and the legitimacy of drug policy debate 107 3.3 Collective action, media and public opinion 3.2.1 Information framing, acceptance and public support 3.4 Flexibility, defection and breach 3.4.1 Golden straightjacket or normative flexibility: the issue of interpretation 4. CANNABIS LEGALIZATION EXPERIMENTS: HOW POLICY WAS CHANGED? 4.1. Policy cycles and local cannabis laws shifts 4.2 Driving forces in cannabis legalization agenda-setting 4.3 A causal model for the advent of legal adult-use cannabis markets 5. CASE STUDIES 5.1 The United States: federal dilemma 5.1.1 Colorado 5.1.2 Washington 5.2 Uruguay 6. CONCLUSION: DOMESTIC CHOICES OVER INTERNATIONAL RULING167 7. BIBLIOGRAPHY