Challenging the UN drug control conventions: problems and possibilities

Bewley-Taylor, David

doi:10.1016/s0955-3959(03)00005-7

Cited by 82 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In the United Kingdom, the UN global drug policy is being upheld, but at the same time the 'drug war' policy that underlies prohibition has been questioned (Bewley-Taylor, 2003). New Zealand, the Netherlands and Portugal, for example, have all undertaken degrees of drug reform and oppose the drug war approach to drug prevention.…”

Section: Legitimation Crisis In Drug Prohibitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth subcultures, normalisation and drug prohibition: The politics of contemporary crisis and change?

Blackman

2010

Br Polit

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article provides a new reading of the crossover between youth subculture and drug consumption, and seeks to demonstrate that drug prohibition has entered a legitimation crisis in social and political policy (Habermas, 1975). This article argues that contemporary drug normalisation is at the centre of the apparent failure of drug prohibition to understand and respond to the growth in oppositional messages derived from digital communication and the use of drug representations by mainstream capitalism to sell everyday commodities for profit. At the same time, UK and US newspapers have questioned the validity of the 'war on drugs' owing to political corruption and human rights abuses in Mexico, Afghanistan and Colombia. The article considers that drug normalisation has disrupted drug policy because intoxicants have become incorporated into everyday culture, and in particular youth subculture. Within the recent literature, young people's drug use has been theorised within a generalised framework of postmodernity. This article argues that drug normalisation theory is not a postmodern concept. It is a theory derived from the work of the Chicago School articulated by Alfred Lindesmith, Howard Becker and David Matza, who in turn influenced the UK National Deviance Conference and the subsequent CCCS theory of subculture. This created the theoretical opportunity to interpret substance consumption as a condition of normalisation separate from crime.

show abstract

Section: Legitimation Crisis In Drug Prohibitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Youth subcultures, normalisation and drug prohibition: The politics of contemporary crisis and change?

Blackman

2010

Br Polit

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The INCB has been strongly criticised for taking a conservative stance in relation to drug policy. The INCB is well known for its lack of support for needle exchange programs, prescribed heroin, and to a lesser extent other substitution treatments such as methadone maintenance (Bewley-Taylor 2003;Csete and Wolfe 2007;Room 1999;Small and Drucker 2007). Consequently, the book may appear deceptively simple to readers who do not know the history and context for the INCB.…”

Section: Hamid Ghodse (Ed)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Book Reviews

Dennis

Dowell

Keleher

et al. 2009

Health Sociology Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…It is possible that these trends will point the way to a fourth stage of international drug control, in which drugs themselves are regarded as less risky and greater attention is paid to the costs of drug prohibition. To date, the international drug control system has responded by hectoring countries to live up to the conventions, but drug policy experts are currently circulating ideas about how countries might amend, modify, denunciate, or disregard the treaties, and some countries are disregarding the INCB and CND opposition to harm reduction and decriminalisation [7,9].…”

Section: A Fourth Stage?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The stages of the international drug control system

Carstairs

2005

Drug and Alcohol Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper argues that the history of the international drug control system of the League of Nations/United Nations can be divided into three cumulative stages. The first stage, the supply stage, dates back to early part of the 20th century, and aimed to reduce the supply of drugs through careful monitoring and trade regulations. This has remained the dominant control strategy. In the middle of the century, demand control, in the form of treatment and criminalization of the individual user, began to appear. This was the least successful stage. Finally, in the 1980s, the dangers of the drug traffic assumed an important place on the international agenda and measures to reduce drug-related organized crime were enacted. To date, this has been a process of proliferation of regulatory strategies. Recently, new challenges to the international drug control system have emerged, including well-funded non-governmental organizations critical of the war on drugs, and the adoption of harm reduction measures in national policies around the world.

show abstract

Challenging the UN drug control conventions: problems and possibilities

Cited by 82 publications

References 4 publications

Youth subcultures, normalisation and drug prohibition: The politics of contemporary crisis and change?

Youth subcultures, normalisation and drug prohibition: The politics of contemporary crisis and change?

Book Reviews

The stages of the international drug control system

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About