Abstract
Throughout Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know the authors, Mark Kleiman, Jonathan Caulkins, and Angela Hawken, describe the issues surrounding American and International drug policy and practice. This is accomplished by examining the drug problem from a variety of academic views: economic in terms of supply and demand, pharmacological effects and conditions brought on by drug use and abuse, and political positions and historical contexts to illustrate where governmental policy has come from and where it might be going. This is accomplished by a review of past policy changes and outcomes steaming from those policies. Additionally, academic research, past experience on behalf of the authors, and theoretical best practice scenarios are discussed. The authors start very broadly discussing drugs and then move to more specific aspects of the drug debate. The goal of this text is to present complex and compounded issues related to drugs use in a context that is understandable and effectual to a variety of academic disciplines and governmental policy makers as well as the general layman.
This book starts with a very general chapter entitled Why is Drug the Name of the Problem. In this section, the authors discuss very broad topics including how drugs are defined, what constitutes a drug problem, levels of addiction, and similar macro characteristics associated with drug use and users. The focus of the next two chapters concerns drug enforcement and the origin of drug laws. This serves to set the stage for a discussion about how the drug-enforcement strategies are positively or negatively influential as it relates preventing abuse, treating abuse, and dealing with drug-related crime described in later chapters.
After a review of the policy stances and governmental directives toward drugs, Chapters 2 and 3, the authors then review the limited scholarly research on medical and psychological benefits of using a wide variety of drugs, Chapter 7. In this section, the authors demonstrate their objectivity in the construction of this text by covering the practical usage, while still holding appreciation for side effects and negative outcomes associated with the use of different drugs. Chapters 8 and 9 in the text cover issues surrounding international drug trafficking, both from an enforcement side and by illuminating the connection between drugs and fundamental terrorism. This is another topic that is susceptible to fanaticism on the part of argument makers, pro or con, but the manner in which these ideas are presented is one that seeks to educate, not polarize.
The final chapter present conclusions drawn from the subsequent chapters’ review of all the included topics and a final section dedicated to the general biological effects of drugs on the brain. The last chapter breaks down the recommendations formulated from the topical discussions throughout into three categories: consensus recommendations, pragmatic recommendations, and a “political-bridge-too-far” list. This serves to rank a likelihood of implementation for the recommendations instead of just trying to browbeat a specific agenda driven opinion into the readers. This book presents a wide view of the current global and American drug situation, and through clear and thorough arguments, the authors provide a firm starting off point for further investigation on the part of the readers to build a personal opinion instead of recycling dated ideological rhetoric.
The book has as its highlight a concise layout from the general, definitions of drugs, addiction and abuse, to the specific, impact on funding terrorism and biological interactions with particular brain receptors. The topical issues are presented in a complementary way that allows the next chapter to be more substantively digestible based on what is covered in the previous chapter/chapters. The progression from the general to the specific lets the reader put the lesser known issues, terrorism interaction specifically, into the context of a global issue that is a construct of economic, political, and humanitarian considerations.
The authors use a variety of government statistics dealing with the amount of drugs consumed, the worth, monetarily, of the international and American drug trades, and the frequency that populations, mostly Americans, use specific drugs to define their positions. They then take a government statistic, like the amount of marijuana consumed in America per year, and compare what monetary value the government places on that marijuana. The authors take into account that most of the marijuana smoked in America is of low quality, and thus low cost, compared to the marijuana developed to have a high THC content. The governmental data seem to be, based on the authors’ presentation, flawed in that its calculation for total price of all marijuana smoked in America is based solely on the price of the high-grade marijuana. This type of analysis is what sets this text apart from the typical agenda driven reviews of drugs and drug-related problems. To supplement the official and calculated reports of drug use and abuse the authors incorporate first-hand accounts from personal interactions with professionals in the field garnered through years of experience. From the analysis, the authors present the arguments for and against individual aspects of the drug debate along with what the author perceive to be the best, worst, and most probable outcome for a particular policy direction. The authors do not direct the readers toward one outlook or another, but instead describe in detail, the totality of an issue and allow the readers to decide for themselves through the reading of the text and through suggested readings offered at the end of each chapter.
This is a text that could contribute to a range of college courses. The issues presented are topically associated with a variety of criminal justice issues, and as such the text could be readily incorporated in courses ranging from introductory to criminal justice all the way through mid- and to upper-level criminologically themed classes. In addition, the argument style presenting both the pros and the cons of issues related to drugs make this text tailor made for philosophy courses in rhetoric and argument making. These topics of drug use and related issues would make this book interesting to a variety of students from a variety of academic backgrounds, and the writing style makes it a text that can be academically beneficial to a student and substantively interesting to a layman. The only shortcoming of this book is that it is mostly based on the opinions, professional as they may be, of the authors, so the inclusion of more empirical evidence could supplement some of the findings. Overall, this text is even handed and as free of agenda as any professional product concerning the global debate of drugs. On the back cover of the book, the authors state that they sought to offer their findings in a manner that, “… breaks from both drug-war can’t and anti-drug-war rant.” This seems to be realized throughout this text.