In response to the decision of the Federal Constitutional Court of 1994, the Federal Government suggested, at the time, that the Land Ministries of Justice establish uniform criteria for the practice of refraining from prosecution as set out in section 31a of the Narcotics Act – especially for the determination of an "insignificant quantity" of cannabis for personal use as stipulated in this provision. While the Laender never agreed on uniform criteria, the judicial administrations of the Laender established, by and by, different criteria and quantities for the application of section 31a BtMG in individual decrees and guidelines. However, a study that looked at the legal equality and legal reality in the prosecution of drug users (original title: "Die Rechtsgleichheit und Rechtswirklichkeitbei der Strafverfolgung von Drogenkonsumenten" NomosVerlag, Baden-Baden) that was carried out in March 1997 by the KriminologischeZentralstelle (German Institute of Criminology) on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Health revealed that where so-called soft drugs are concerned, particularly hashish and marijuana, there is a large degree of agreement throughout Germany on the quantities where the provision of section 31a BtMG is regularly applied, so that an essentially uniform administration of justice as requested by the Federal Constitutional Court can be said to exist. In October 2002, the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Security commissioned the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (MPI) with another research project on "drug use and prosecution practice" (Drogenkonsum und Strafverfolgungspraxis). The project aimed to update the findings gained by the German Institute of Criminology in 1997. In March 2006, the MPI concluded that there were "clear differences" in the application of section 31a BtMG that, in view of the stipulations of the Federal Constitutional Court, seemed to be at least problematic and, thus, arrived at what appears to be a tendentially different result, at least for cannabis-related offences, from the 1997 study. The MPI's study triggered a harmonisation process in the Federal Laender so that the Justice Ministers of the Laender now start from an essentially uniform application of the law.