Research Handbook on International Drug Policy

Abstract

This volume is part of the response to the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on international drug policy and the emergence of analysis of international drug policy in academic literature. Editors David Bewley-Taylor and Khalid Tinasti, both respected authors in their own right, have collated a rich collection of essays and chapters from a welcomely international list of academic and specialist authors, with significant representation from non-Anglophone and non-Western countries. They have selected authors to provide an analytical critique of international drug policy, evidencing their stance of challenging ‘official’ literature on the topic. The editors describe current policy as being ‘a predominantly supply oriented approach based on prohibition and a reliance on law enforcement, and in some cases military, interventions’. Organised in four parts—‘History of international drug control’, ‘The geospatial dimensions of drug policy’ (chapters cover the Americas, Africa, Muslim nations, Asia, Oceania and Europe), ‘Emerging tensions within the UN drug control system and beyond’, and ‘Future challenges’—the variety of authorial backgrounds provides a correspondingly rich collection of themes, regions, countries and political processes, extending the debate on international drug policy and the workings and failings of the UN Conventions. Themes include the origins of international drug policy, access to essential medicines, human rights, the growth of alternative policy and practice and the implicit disregard of the orthodoxy this represents, the emergence of novel psychoactive substances and responses to them, crypto-markets, metrics and the use of international drug policy by some nations as a disguise or justification for internal repression. The editors posit that contradictions and disagreements amongst the international community and international agencies are pulling the ‘consensus’ in different directions, reform versus prohibition, revealing the lack of reality (and success) in the Conventions’ terminology of a drug-free world and societies free of drug abuse and the damaging and destructive impact of the policies and practices which operate under their umbrella. The chapters are the results of research, many portraying geographies and themes that are themselves the result of research and field-work, which will not be welcomed by some regimes. The book is not, though, a handbook of research methodologies: the closest it comes to being so is Measham’s chapter on novel psychoactive substances (NPS), describing research practices which have been developed to determine the prevalence of NPS and the chemicals involved in them. This does not detract from the overall breadth and richness of the contents. Nor is it the ‘first comprehensive overview … of the drug policy landscape’, as the editors suggest, having been preceded byKlein and Stothard’s 2018 collection, to which both editors contributed chapters.