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Author: Douglas N. Husak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1992-07-31
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 9780521427272
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book was the first serious work to address the question whether adults have the right to use drugs for recreational purposes.
Author: Mark A.R. Kleiman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-07-13
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 0199831386
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →While there have always been norms and customs around the use of drugs, explicit public policies--regulations, taxes, and prohibitions--designed to control drug abuse are a more recent phenomenon. Those policies sometimes have terrible side-effects: most prominently the development of criminal enterprises dealing in forbidden (or untaxed) drugs and the use of the profits of drug-dealing to finance insurgency and terrorism. Neither a drug-free world nor a world of free drugs seems to be on offer, leaving citizens and officials to face the age-old problem: What are we going to do about drugs? In Drugs and Drug Policy, three noted authorities survey the subject with exceptional clarity, in this addition to the acclaimed series, What Everyone Needs to Know®. They begin, by defining "drugs," examining how they work in the brain, discussing the nature of addiction, and exploring the damage they do to users. The book moves on to policy, answering questions about legalization, the role of criminal prohibitions, and the relative legal tolerance for alcohol and tobacco. The authors then dissect the illicit trade, from street dealers to the flow of money to the effect of catching kingpins, and show the precise nature of the relationship between drugs and crime. They examine treatment, both its effectiveness and the role of public policy, and discuss the beneficial effects of some abusable substances. Finally they move outward to look at the role of drugs in our foreign policy, their relationship to terrorism, and the ugly politics that surround the issue. Crisp, clear, and comprehensive, this is a handy and up-to-date overview of one of the most pressing topics in today's world. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
Author: Simon Flacks
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-03-31
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13: 1000368432
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Debates about the regulation of drugs are inseparable from talk of children and the young. Yet how has this association come to be so strong, and why does it have so much explanatory, rhetorical and political force? The premise for this book is that the relationship between drugs and childhood merits more exploration beyond simply pointing out that children and drugs are both ‘things we tend to get worried about’. It asks what is at stake when legislators, lobbyists and decision-makers revert to claims about children in order to sustain a given legal or policy position. Beginning with a genealogy of the relationship between the discursive artefacts of ‘drugs’ and ‘childhood’, the book draws on Foucauldian methodologies to explore how childhood functions as a device in the biopolitical management of drug use(rs) and supply. In addition to analysing decriminalisation initiatives and sentencing measures, it (unusually) reaches beyond the criminal context to consider the significance of the ‘politics of childhood’ for law- and policymaking in the fields of family justice and education. It concludes by arguing that the currency of childhood and ‘youth’ is not reducible to rhetoric; it shapes the discursive entities of drugs and addiction and is one of the ways in which particular substances become socially, culturally and politically intelligible. At the same time, ‘drugs’ serve as a technology of child normalisation. The book will be essential reading for policymakers as well as researchers and students working in the areas of Criminal Justice, Law, Psychology and Sociology.
Author: David Richards
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 1986
Total Pages: 334
ISBN-13: 9780847675258
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Among the most commonly argued legal questions are those involving "victimless" crimes--consensual adult sexual relations (including homosexuality and prostitution), the use of drugs, and the right to die. How can they be distinguished from proper crimes, and how can we, as citizens, judge the complex moral and legal issues that such questions entail? David Richards, a teacher of law in the areas of constitutional and criminal law, and a moral and legal philosopher concerned with the investigation of legal concepts, applies an interdisciplinary approach to the question of overcriminalization, he draws on legal and philosophical arguments and links the subject to history, psychology, social science, and literature. To demonstrate how gross and unjust overcriminalization has developed, Professor Richards explores basic assumptions that often underlie the common American sense of proper criminalization.
Author: Doris Marie Provine
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2008-09-15
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 0226684784
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Race is clearly a factor in government efforts to control dangerous drugs, but the precise ways that race affects drug laws remain difficult to pinpoint. Illuminating this elusive relationship, Unequal under Law lays out how decades of both manifest and latent racism helped shape a punitive U.S. drug policy whose onerous impact on racial minorities has been willfully ignored by Congress and the courts. Doris Marie Provine’s engaging analysis traces the history of race in anti-drug efforts from the temperance movement of the early 1900s to the crack scare of the late twentieth century, showing how campaigns to criminalize drug use have always conjured images of feared minorities. Explaining how alarm over a threatening black drug trade fueled support in the 1980s for a mandatory minimum sentencing scheme of unprecedented severity, Provine contends that while our drug laws may no longer be racist by design, they remain racist in design. Moreover, their racial origins have long been ignored by every branch of government. This dangerous denial threatens our constitutional guarantee of equal protection of law and mutes a much-needed national discussion about institutionalized racism—a discussion that Unequal under Law promises to initiate.
Author: Doug Husak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2005-08-29
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 1139445855
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the United States today, the use or possession of many drugs is a criminal offense. Can these criminal laws be justified? What are the best reasons to punish or not to punish drug users? These are the fundamental issues debated in this book by two prominent philosophers of law. Douglas Husak argues in favor of drug decriminalization, by clarifying the meaning of crucial terms, such as legalize, decriminalize, and drugs; and by identifying the standards by which alternative drug policies should be assessed. He critically examines the reasons typically offered in favor of our current approach and explains why decriminalization is preferable. Peter de Marneffe argues against drug legalization, demonstrating why drug prohibition, especially the prohibition of heroin, is necessary to protect young people from self-destructive drug use. If the empirical assumptions of this argument are sound, he reasons, drug prohibition is perfectly compatible with our rights to liberty.
Author: James Gray
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2011-12-16
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1439908001
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Our drug prohibition policy is hopeless, just as Prohibition, our alcohol prohibition policy, was before it. Today there are more drugs in our communities and at lower prices and higher strengths than ever before. We have built large numbers of prisons, but they are overflowing with non-violent drug offenders. The huge profits made from drug sales are corrupting people and institutions here and abroad. And far from being protected by our drug prohibition policy, our children are being recruited by it to a lifestyle of drug use and drug selling. Judge Gray’s book drives a stake through the heart of the War on Drugs. After documenting the wide-ranging harms caused by this failed policy, Judge Gray also gives us hope. We have viable options. The author evaluates these options, ranging from education and drug treatment to different strategies for taking the profit out of drug-dealing. Many officials will not say publicly what they acknowledge privately about the failure of the War on Drugs. Politicians especially are afraid of not appearing "tough on drugs." But Judge Gray’s conclusions as a veteran trial judge and former federal prosecutor are reinforced by the testimonies of more than forty other judges nationwide.
Author: Thomas Szasz
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Published: 1996-04-01
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780815603337
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In Our Right to Drugs, Szasz shows how the present drug war started at the beginning of this century, when the US government first assumed the task of protecting people from patent medicines. By the end of World War I the free market in drugs was but a dim memory. Instead of dwelling on the familiar impracticality and unfairness of drug laws, Szasz demonstrates the deleterious effects of prescription laws, which place people under lifelong medical supervision. The result is that most Americans today prefer a coercive and corrupt command drug economy to a free market in drugs.
Author: Kate Seear
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-03-31
Total Pages: 182
ISBN-13: 9780367727147
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book considers how largely accepted 'legal truths' about drugs and addiction are made and sustained through practices of lawyering. Lawyers play a vital and largely underappreciated role in constituting legal certainties about substances and 'addiction', including links between alcohol and other drugs, and phenomena such as family violence. Such practices exacerbate, sustain and stabilise 'addicted' realities, with a range of implications - many of them seemingly unjust - for people who use alcohol and other drugs. This book explores these issues, drawing upon data collected for a major international study on alcohol and other drugs in the law, including interviews with lawyers, magistrates and judges; analyses of case law; and legislation. Focussing on an array of legal practices, including processes of law-making, human rights deliberations, advocacy and negotiation strategies, and the sentencing of offenders, and buttressed by overarching analyses of the ethics and politics of such practices, the book looks at how alcohol and other drug 'addiction' emerges and is concretised through the everyday work lawyers and decision makers do. Foregrounding 'practices', the book also shows that law is more fragile than we might assume. It concludes by presenting a blueprint for how lawyers can rethink their advocacy practices in light of this fragility and the opportunities it presents for remaking law and the subjects and objects shaped by it. This ground-breaking book will be of interest not only to those studying and working within the field of alcohol and drug addiction but also to lawyers and judges practising in this area and to scholars in a range of disciplines, including law, science and technology studies, sociology, gender studies and cultural studies
Author: Human Rights Watch (Organization)
Publisher: Human Rights Watch
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 56
ISBN-13: 1564324508
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Using national drug arrest data from 1980 to 2007, this report illuminates the persistence and extent of racial disparities in the so-called?war on drugs? in the United States. Although blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at roughly comparable rates, blacks have been consistently arrested for drug offenses at rates that are from 2.8 to 5.5 times higher nationwide than white drug arrest rates. In addition, this report reveals that among individual states, black drug arrest rates in a single year, 2006, ranged from 2 to 11.3 times higher than white rates. Finally, the report shows that since 1980, the preponderance of drug arrests have been for possession, not sales. Millions of Americans have acquired a criminal record because they engaged in the minor non-violent offense of drug possession. Human Rights Watch calls on the United States to revise its drug control policies to reduce reliance on criminal prosecution and address these troubling racial disparities.
