No abstract

On the 13 th of February 2012, a decree established criminology as a new discipline in the French university system. Six months later, the new Ministry of Higher Education and Research rolled back the reform and abolished the newly created section of criminology. Because French university governance remains centralized and corporatist, any project that transforms an interdisciplinary field of research into a fully-fledged academic discipline is difficult to carry out, all the more when the latter bears a political and utilitarian dimension as criminology does. It comes then as no surprise that in the hyper-disciplined French university, the disciplinary enterprise of institutionalising criminology is fraught with difficulties, not the least being the existence of an undisciplined academia.

Drug prohibition allows us to study over a significant period of time how penal provisions framed at a supranational level flow, settle, and unsettle across different countries. At a time of growing doubt about the benefit of criminalization of drug use, it also provides a case‐study as to how epistemic communities may rely on comparative research to identify best practices and promote them as normative alternatives in the face of a long‐entrenched legal dogma. In order to explore these issues, this article looks at the UN drug control system from the perspective of comparative law. It shows how the concept of legal transplant provides a useful tool to understand the limits of transnational criminal law designed on a global scale to tackle the ‘drug problem', and it clarifies the various types of legal comparison that might contribute to addressing this failed transplant.

In Europe, the extent of drug use and drug trafficking vary greatly from region to region. This is also true of domestic drug policies which, against many indicators, are very diverse. However, the deepening of the integration process of the continent and the rise of subnational actors in the design of local responses to drug issues have led to a progressive convergence. A policy discourse and a legal attitude that favor treating and reintegrating drug users rather than depriving them of their liberty has been developing at the transnational level. A cultural model for drug policy is emerging with enough cohesion to be able to claim that the European Union and European states (including non-EU Member States) have reached shared positions on the political acceptability of harm-reduction measures. Meanwhile medicinal cannabis is increasingly making inroads in the field of conventional medicine and several jurisdictions have been developing tolerant policies regarding recreational cannabis.