This book explores how international drug control law should be interpreted within the context of international human rights law.

The first integrated analysis of the causes and effects of diverging views of drug use within the international community.

This book contains nine essays written by distinguished scholars from North America. Europe, and Asia, and provides an in-depth examination of the socio-legal developments of drug control in different countries. Important rational approaches to the formulation of drug policy are discussed. A must-read for anyone interested in the highly topical, worldwide drug problem.

See also volume I, Regulation of Cannabis Cultivation for Recreational Use under the UN Narcotic Drugs Conventions and the EU Legal Instruments in Anti-Drugs Policy, here. Both volumes can also be purchased as a set here. What legal avenues do states have to regulate cannabis cultivations and trade for recreational use? This question has generated heated discussions in various societies, in political and academic discourses. Several states are considering adjusting or have adjusted their legal and policy approaches towards a more lenient regulation of cannabis cultivation and trade for the recreational user market. Seen from the perspective of relevant United Nations narcotic drugs conventions, the legal avenues for regulation are virtually non-existent. This book takes an innovative approach to this issue and approaches the possibility for regulation of cannabis for recreational use from the perspective of positive human rights obligations. To what extend can regulation of cannabis for recreational use, for the sake of health, safety and crime control, be considered a positive human rights obligation resulting from the right to health, the right to life, the right to physical and psychological integrity and the right to privacy? From the subsequent conclusions, a second pertinent question arises: what hierarchical relationship, if any, exists between these positive human rights obligations and the obligations arising from the UN drugs conventions? Through an in-depth and systematic analysis of relevant international human rights law and public international law, this book presents the steps, assumptions and conditions that are relevant if a state were to decide, on the basis of the incumbent positive human rights obligations, to permit cannabis cultivation and trade for the recreational user market under regulation. PIET HEIN VAN KEMPEN, LLM, PhD, and MASHA FEDOROVA, LLM, PhD, are Full Professors of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law at the Faculty of Law of Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.--

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.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Examining the impact of drug criminalisation on a previously overlooked demographic, this book argues that women are disproportionately affected by a flawed policy approach.

The League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, created in 1920, culminated almost eight decades of political turmoil over opium trafficking, which was by far the largest state-backed drug trade in the age of empire. Opponents of opium had long struggled to rein in the profitable drug. Opium’s Long Shadow shows how diverse local protests crossed imperial, national, and colonial boundaries to gain traction globally and harness public opinion as a moral deterrent in international politics after World War I. Steffen Rimner traces the far-flung itineraries and trenchant arguments of reformers—significantly, feminists and journalists—who viewed opium addiction as a root cause of poverty, famine, “white slavery,” and moral degradation. These activists targeted the international reputation of drug-trading governments, first and foremost Great Britain, British India, and Japan, becoming pioneers of the global political tactic we today call naming and shaming. But rather than taking sole responsibility for their own behavior, states in turn appropriated anti-drug criticism to shame fellow sovereigns around the globe. Consequently, participation in drug control became a prerequisite for membership in the twentieth-century international community. Rimner relates how an aggressive embrace of anti-drug politics earned China and other Asian states new influence on the world stage. The link between drug control and international legitimacy has endured. Amid fierce contemporary debate over the wisdom of narcotics policies, the 100-year-old moral consensus Rimner describes remains a backbone of the international order.