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Informationen zum Autor Mark A.R. Kleiman is Professor of Public Policy at UCLA, editor of The Journal of Drug Policy Analysis, and author of When Brute Force Fails and Against Excess. Jonathan P. Caulkins is Stever Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.Angela Hawken is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. Klappentext 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? Zusammenfassung In Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know Mark A. R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins, and Angela Hawken will provide a comprehensive introduction to domestic drug policy. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgements Introduction 1: WHY IS "DRUG" THE NAME OF A PROBLEM? What is a drug? And why is drug use a problem? If abusable psychoactives can be used safely, where does the problem come in? What does it mean for a drug to be "toxic"? What is behavioural toxicity? Is it the same as intoxication? What is addiction?l toxicity? Is it the same as What is dependency? Is addiction a disease? Is it a "chronic, relapsing brain disorder"? Does that mean that drug addicts are not morally responsible for their drug-taking? Is the risk of addiction limited to those with an "addictive personality," or to those genetically predisposed to addiction? Which drug is most dangerous or most addictive? 2: WHY HAVE DRUG LAWS?ddicts are not morally responsible What is drug abuse control policy? All those sound like good ideas. So what's the problem?ctive Then wouldn't it be possible to have no coercive drug abuse control policies at all? And wouldn't such a "no coercion" policy have results better than the current mess? The damage from cocaine dealing and cocaine enforcement, and the crime committed by cocaine users to pay for their habit, is much greater than the damage from cocaine use. Doesn't that prove that prohibition does more harm than good? If the results of legalization are uncertain, why not just try it out, and go back to the current system if legalization doesn't work? Why would you expect newly-legal drugs to be much more widely used than the same drugs are now? After all, anyone who is really determined to get an illegal drug can do so. But wasn't alcohol prohibition in the United States a complete failure? But everyone knows that Prohibition led to a big increase in homicides. But didn't Holland and Portugal legalize drugs without any resulting disaster? But didn't Holland legalize cannabis? What's the difference between "legalization" and "decriminalization" or "depenalization"? How much of the increase in consumption after legalization would reflect increased problem use rather than increased casual and beneficial use? Can't the effects of marketing be reined in by regulations and taxes? What about legal availability without free trade? Couldn't that work? Couldn't you just let users go to physicians for their recreational drugs, and make it the doctor's business to try to prevent the development of problem use patterns? But isn't it impossible to make someone better off by coercing behavioural change? If people want drugs, doesn't depriving them of drugs make them worse off by definition? If someone chooses to harm himself with a drug, why is that any of anyone else's business? But wouldn't any inc...
