International Drug Control

Abstract

There remains substantial agreement among the international community on many aspects of the contemporary UN drug control regime. However, diverging views on the non-medical and non-scientific use of a range of controlled substances make drug policy an increasingly contested and transitionary field of multinational cooperation. Employing a fine-grained and interdisciplinary approach, this book provides the first integrated analysis of the sources, manifestations and sometimes paradoxical implications of this divergence. The author develops an original explanatory framework through which to understand better the dynamic and tense intersection between policy shifts at varying levels of governance and the regime's core prohibitive norm. Highlighting the centrality of the harm reduction approach and tolerant cannabis policies to an ongoing process of regime transformation, this book examines the efforts of those actors seeking to defend the existing international control framework and explores rationales and scenarios which may lead to the international community moving beyond it.

Contrôle des drogues et mondialisation : enjeux et limites de la régulation internationale

“…Ce fond, qui fut essentiellement financé par les États-Unis, est rapidement devenu un outil de répression et de lutte contre le trafic de drogues. À défaut d'évoquer une mondialisation de la lutte aux drogues, on peut toutefois reconnaître l'existence d'une certaine américanisation des contrôles, qui s'exercerait à travers des contraintes de nature économique et diplomatique (Bewley-Taylor, 1999).…”

Regulating Global Drug Problems

“…The drivers for prohibition were complex and diverse but centred around the foreign policy and economic interests of certain powerful nations, most notably the US but also Britain and other Western European countries and, to a lesser extent, China (Courtwright 2001;Bruun et al 1975;Bewley-Taylor 1999;Nadelmann 1990:502-513;van Duyne and Levi 2005). This is important because it tells us that power, politics and trade have always been at the heart of prohibition, even when policy discourses have emphasised other concerns like health or morality.…”

Widening the debate on the drug policy ratchet: response to commentaries

“…As Caulkins notes, these biases have been built into the international system of control by the United Nations drug treaties. These treaties themselves are the products of power politics and systemic inequalities [11], not of mythically disinterested scientists or of errant, irrational bureaucrats. We would argue that there is more 'room for manoeuvre' [12] within the treaties than Caulkins allows, but we agree with him that more rational drug policies would be easier to develop under a different framework of international control.…”