Change Or Continuity In Drug Policy

While evidence-based policy is an emerging rhetoric of the desire by and for governments to develop policies based on the best available evidence, drug policy is an area where particular challenges abound. This book is a detailed and comprehensive examination of the contours of drug policy development through the consideration of the particular roles of science, media, and interest groups. Using Belgium as the primary case-study, supplemented by insights gathered from other countries, the author contributes to a richer understanding of the science-policy nexus in the messy, real-world complexities of drug policy. Change or Continuity in Drug Policy: The Roles of Science, Media, and Interest Groups is the first book to bring together policy and media theories, knowledge utilisation models, and public scholarship literature. As such, the book provides unique insights relevant to aspects of change or continuity in drug policies in Europe and beyond. This book will be of great value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to academics, practitioners and policymakers with interest in the science-policy nexus with a particular focus on the drug policy domain.

Offers new and cutting-edge research on the role of drugs in Iranian society and government. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

With the legalization of recreational cannabis markets in Uruguay, Canada, and several U.S. states, a breakthrough in conventional cannabis policy is emerging. But legalization is not a binary choice between prohibition and some regulated commercial model (like alcohol). A commercial market is just one of many ways to implement legalizationand moving directly from prohibition to commercial legalization leaps from one extreme to the other. Tom Decorte, a criminologist and anthropologist at Ghent University (Belgium), who has published numerous articles on substance use, cannabis markets, and local drug monitoring systems, argues that most of us are bypassing other, safer forms of legalization, including the nonprofit model. He explores topics such as: Why we need to consider regulation of cannabis markets. How local authorities and grassroots movements are advocating change. How to best design and implement approaches to legalization. Join the author as he examines international regulatory controls over cannabis possession, use, and cultivationas well as a framework for regulating the cannabis market via a nonprofit corporate model that promotes public health and safety over profits

The drug control regime established by the international community has not succeeded in curbing either the demand for, or the offer of, narcotics. But, despite a series of developments in the Americas – including the legalisation of cannabis in Uruguay and in several states in the United States of America – there is still little support in Europe for repealing drug-prohibition laws. Nevertheless, a gradual policy convergence reveals the emergence of a European model favouring public-health strategies over a strictly penal approach to combatting drugs, while growing transnational support for legalisation indicates the persistence of an alternative paradigm for drug policy. This book examines the various influences on drug policies in Europe, as grassroots movements, NGO networks, private foundations and academic research centres increasingly confront the prevailing discourses of drug prohibition. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach and bringing together legal scholars, social scientists and practitioners, it provides a comprehensive and critical assessment of drug policy reform in Europe.

This book examines the topical issue of global drug policy and outlines five steps that could be taken to improve its effectiveness. A public criminology approach is applied to explore not only what could be done, but also why it matters and how it could be achieved. It argues that more effective global drug policies require an acknowledgement of the failure of a war on drugs approach and the harms it has caused. Instead, strategies that reduce drug related harm should be prioritised. An innovative and diverse range of approaches should be developed that are underpinned by evaluation and dissemination of results. Finally, the horizons of the drug policy debate should be broadened. In line with the central aims of public criminology, this book provides an accessible contribution to global drug policy debates that links theory and practice and which will have appeal to a wide range of audiences.

This book offers an innovative account of social-control and behaviorist thinking in social policies and welfare systems and the impact it has had on disadvantaged groups. The contributors review various controls and impulsions that have been applied to individuals and households and how such interventions have narrowed social rights. They illuminate the links between social control developments, welfare systems, and the liberalization of economics, and they highlight the negative impact that behaviorist assumptions?and the subsequent strategies that have grown out of them?have had on the disadvantaged. Overall the volume provides a cutting-edge critical engagement with contemporary policy developments.

A collection of essays on the 'pre-history' of the impact of AIDS, and its subsequent history.

Some Sharp observations ... Emphasizing interrelated themes of policy failure and policy change, this book is a theoretical and conceptual examination of drug policy in the United States. It is in part a policy history, using case studies to link specific drug policies to a general theoretical framework. These cases focus primarily on three important and interesting episodes of drug policy development during the Nixon-Carter, and Reagan-Bush administrations, and the author interprets the historical significance of each period. The Dilemma of Drug Policy in the United States examines a wide array of ideas concerning incrementalism, interest groups, and symbolic politics to determine why there has been so much continuity in drug policy despite policy failure. Finally, a chapter on policy alternatives deals with the legalization debate, and critiques it from the perspective of a political scientist.