While evidence-based policy is an emerging rhetoric of the desire by and for governments to develop policies based on the best available evidence, drug policy is an area where particular challenges abound. This book is a detailed and comprehensive examination of the contours of drug policy development through the consideration of the particular roles of science, media, and interest groups. Using Belgium as the primary case-study, supplemented by insights gathered from other countries, the author contributes to a richer understanding of the science-policy nexus in the messy, real-world complexities of drug policy. Change or Continuity in Drug Policy: The Roles of Science, Media, and Interest Groups is the first book to bring together policy and media theories, knowledge utilisation models, and public scholarship literature. As such, the book provides unique insights relevant to aspects of change or continuity in drug policies in Europe and beyond. This book will be of great value to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as to academics, practitioners and policymakers with interest in the science-policy nexus with a particular focus on the drug policy domain.

This cross-Europe analysis explores crucial aspects of long term recovery from substance use. Leading experts set out the evolving needs of people who have sought to change their use of substances and the factors in their progress. The book concludes with clear recommendations for improving future research, policy and practice.

This book offers practical advice on designing, conducting and analyzing interviews with ‘elite’ and ‘expert’ persons (or ‘socially prominent actors’), with a focus on criminology and criminal justice. It offers dilemmas and examples of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ practices in order to encourage readers to critically asses their own work. It also addresses methodological issues which include: access, power imbalances, getting past ‘corporate answers’, considerations of whether or not it is at times acceptable to ask leading questions and whether to enter a discussion with a respondent at all. This book will be valuable to students and scholars conducting qualitative research.

In the 21st century, environmental harm is an ever-present reality of our globalised world. Over the last 20 years, criminologists, working alongside a range of other disciplines from the social and physical sciences, have made great strides in their understanding of how different institutions in society, and criminal justice systems in particular – respond – or fail to respond – to the harm imposed on ecosystems and their human and non-human components. Such research has crystallised into the rapidly evolving field of green criminology. This pioneering volume, with contributions from leading experts along with younger scholars, represents the state of the art in criminologists’ pursuit of understanding in the environmental sphere while at the same time challenging academics, lawmakers and policy developers to explore new directions in the study of environmental harm.

This book demonstrates how culture matters for the understanding of cannabis use. It stems from the growing body of research on how users manoeuvre stigmatisation and celebrate the subcultural status of cannabis amid rapid transformation of the substance and its societal reception. The volume presents international studies that challenge the normalisation thesis and simplified views on patterns of use, as well as the Western bias in social research of cannabis. Chapters in this book map the variability of cannabis cultures and markets on a global scale including digital, regulated and illicit markets in transformation. They study cannabis through stigmatisation, gender, social worlds, symbolic boundaries, subcultures, and identity work. The chapters address diverse themes, such as how Latvian, Polish, Nigerian or Mexican users negotiate mainstream conservative, and sometimes gendered societal reactions to cannabis - and how Nordic users’ identities are played out in more progressive contexts. Chapters also cover cannabis use by older people and small growers’ cultures in the US and the interconnections between the established cultures and their digital augmentation in Australia. Synthetic cannabis use is studied in New Zealand and the many contradictions of contemporary cannabis policies are highlighted throughout. Taken together, this book offers an assortment of studies that provide a descriptive and conceptual snapshot of ongoing transitions of paradoxically stable cannabis cultures. It was originally published as a special issue of Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy.