Rethinking Drug Markets and Societal Reactions to them: Contributions in Drug Policy Research

Abstract

This issue of Contemporary Drug Problems consists of selected articles from the first Annual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy (ISSDP). The conference was held in Oslo on March 22-23, 2007 and was attended by 75 researchers, mostly from Australia, Europe, and the United States.The ISSDP has been founded in recognition that drug policy has become itself a substantial research topic, engaging many disciplines. As reflected in the articles of this volume, it involves at a minimum criminology, economics, operations research, political science and public health. Though there are learned societies, such as the Society for the Study of Addiction (in the United Kingdom), the College on Problems of Drug Dependence (in the United States) and the Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs (Australia and New Zealand), that include drug policy in their remit, the topic is generally of marginal interest at those conferences. With the growth of the European Monitoring Center on Drugs and Drug Abuse, the topic and data related to it has become prominent in Western Europe. A preliminary meeting in London in December 2005 established that there was an interest in developing a new society and the Oslo conference was the first test of that proposition. The second Annual conference was held in Lisbon in April 2008 and it attracted twice as many Abstracts as did the first one.The principal purpose of the Society is to build a community. Interdisciplinary fields are always challenged in that respect. We are trained in a discipline and it is hard to reach outside of it. Yet all real life policy problems are multi-disciplinary and progress requires collaboration, and that in turn may require at least a partial redefinition of one's professional identity. For example, Jonathan Caulkins, one of the authors in this volume, is both an operations researcher and a drug policy researcher. He publishes in disciplinary journals such as Operations Research and Management Science and in journals of interest to drug policy analysts, such as this one and Addiction. The ISSDP aims to make more researchers feel comfortable with dual identities.This issue contains nine articles, all of which were subject to peer review; originally eighteen articles were offered for this issue. We believe the articles here nicely illustrate the range of issues and methods that the ISSDP intends to foster.In an analysis focused on the United States, Harold Pollack offers an appraisal of the challenges inherent to seeking a balance between deterrence and compassion in drug policy (an enduring tension as he puts it). He describes the political controversy over needle/syringe distribution programs (NSPs) within the United States, and highlights the difficulty experienced by the public health community in negotiating the politicised terrain around the concept of reduction. He carefully distinguishes the way in which syringe exchange for HIV prevention is a powerful, but unique case. He also emphasises that combining elements of both use reduction and reduction policies offers a pragmatic way forward, placing this within an emergent public sentiment in favour of viewing the latter as non-contradictory with the former. The article concludes with some tentative, hopeful signs that a more humane strand can become the guiding principle of future policy.In Identity theft? Re-framing the policing of organized drug crime in the UK as reduction, Martin Elvins offers a timely examination of the increasingly diverse use of the term reduction. The article focuses on the recent movement in use of the term away from its original emphasis on the rights of drug users towards a more broadly based, policy driven concept of community and societal harms linked to drugs. In discussing the 2005 attempt by the Home Office to develop a drug index and the emergence in 2006 of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) as a harm reduction agency with law enforcement powers, the article explores the extent to which there has been a reframing of UK drug policy, the significance of reduction terminology in public understanding of illicit drug issues and argues that there is now a need to reconsider the current nomenclature, particularly in relation to user rights and law enforcement. …