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This chapter reviews the historical development of the world opiate market, including the international policy regime that surrounds it. It explores the period of growth of the opiate market in the nineteenth century, the decline that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century and the re-emergence and transformation that occurred during the latter part of the twentieth century. Historical evidence suggests that changes in policies especially the first and second International Opium Conventions of 1912 and 1925, played a part in the major reductions in opium consumption that occurred during the first half of twentieth century. The analysis of international and domestic drug control efforts indicate that increasing control and prohibition of opiates reflected cultural biases of western societies and governments.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the global expansion of psychoactive substance use. It then discusses current international drug control treaties, the implementation of the treaties, the dominant role of the USA, and the effects of the international drug control system.

This chapter is about supply control approaches to drug problems, a set of interventions targeting the production, distribution, and sale of illicit psychoactive substances. It begins by explaining the distinctions between law enforcement and supply control. Because supply control traditionally focuses on enforcement against producers and dealers, an analytical framework is presented that links different kinds of enforcement to different layers in the drug distribution chain described in Chapter 5. The remainder of the chapter is organized by the supply level that is targeted by an intervention: production/refining, international trafficking, high-level domestic enforcement, and retail enforcement. The final section presents an assessment of what is currently understood about the effectiveness of the different programmes.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the possibility of reducing opiate and heroin production. The result reveals that drug control policy, especially governments' enforcement of prohibitions on production and trade, and properties of addiction can help explain important differences in the reduction of opiate and heroin production, largely through their divergent effects on production, trafficking, and consumption. This chapter identifies the determinants of opiate and heroin production, trafficking, and consumption. It contends that the main rationale for long-term policy should be to minimize the adverse consequences associated with opiate production, trafficking, and consumption in terms of human health, welfare, violence, corruption, and conflict.

This chapter examines how well prescription regimes perform their role of allowing psychoactive substances to be consumed for approved, i.e., medical, purposes, while preventing their use for non-approved purposes. It begins with a description of the prescription system that now operates in developed nations, and then lays out the regulatory tools which can influence prescription practices. It focuses on a relatively new set of studies that evaluate these interventions in terms of how they affect drug consumption and patient health. The final parts of the chapter consider the control of psychopharmaceuticals by mechanisms outside of the prescription regimes, such as efforts to control deceptive marketing and to reduce diversion through law enforcement.

This chapter reviews policies designed to deter drug use, through criminal sanctions on the possession and use of psychoactive substances. It shows that enforcement can reduce demand via deterrence, incapacitation, and/or rehabilitation.

This chapter describes some of the observed policy variation and its sources, so that readers can better understand their own country's choices and how they are framed. It begins by describing the range of drug problems and policies in two very different countries, Mexico and Sweden. These illustrate the interconnections among problems, context, and policies. This is followed by a more parsimonious characterization of the variation in the problems and policies of seven nations: China, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Sweden, the UK, and the USA. All seven have serious drug problems that differ in nature, to which they also have responded in diverse ways. The remainder of the chapter elaborates the nature and consequences of the differences. The principal focus here is on policy variation across countries, but there is also important variation within a country. Laws are unlikely to differ much across states or municipalities, but they may be implemented in very different ways.

This chapter turns to American drug use during Richard M. Nixon's first years as President. It illustrates the increasing problem through statistics, identifies the five measures that Nixon promised would help solve the situation, and explains how Nixon's administration planned to use foreign policy to fix a domestic issue. The next sections focus on the Turkish poppy ban (Turkey being one of the major suppliers for heroin in the United States), drug use among enlisted U.S. personnel, and the complicated nature of narcotics control policy. This chapter then turns to the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which initially presented generally lower penalties with regards to marijuana, removed the death penalty, and classified basic possession offenses as misdemeanors. Other efforts to thwart drug use were the Controlled Dangerous Substances Act of 1969 and Operation Intercept.

This chapter discusses drug use during President Lyndon Johnson's term. It notes that by the end of Johnson's presidency, several measures that would soon form a response to drug use were already in place. It looks at the confusion and concern of the public over the issue and examines the “marihuana consensus.” The chapter then takes a look at the three areas that Johnson's staffers focused on, namely the rationalization and reform of the entire body of current drug law, the creation of the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and the improvement of access to treatment for noncriminal and criminal drug users alike. The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 and the Narcotics Addict Rehabilitation Act are also covered.

This chapter rounds up the discussion of Richard M. Nixon's role in illicit drug use in the United States. It can be noted that Nixon was re-elected partly due to his administration's approach to law and order concerns, as well as drug abuse and crimes related to it. It first studies one of the most controversial 1972 initiatives of Nixon, the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE), which served to allow the federal government to help local government units prod addicts to enter treatment and enforce drug laws. It then turns to the issue of legalizing marijuana and the efforts that were put in place to catch attention for Nixon's anti-narcotics programs. This chapter also looks at Nixon's other efforts to solve the drug use issue, the collaboration between ODALE and the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention (SAODAP), and the de-emphasis process for the 1972 federal drug abuse control policy. The chapter ends with a discussion of Nixon's resignation on August 8, 1974.

This chapter describes the international pharmaceutical industry’s transformation during World War II as a result of U.S. economic warfare initiatives in Latin America. Provisioning drugs and implementing wartime drug controls offered diplomatic leverage as the United States sought to secure exports of raw materials essential for military mobilization while working to undermine Axis economic power in the region. In Peru and Bolivia, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Warfare worked with corporations and national governments to enforce the replacement of German with U.S. manufactured drugs essential for workers in critical wartime industries. The United States became the dominant global supplier of pharmaceuticals, the major power determining international coca commodity flows, and the driving force behind an ideological regulatory apparatus foundational to international drug control.

In the years since Dr. Jack Kevorkian went to jail, public involvement with the issues of physician-assisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia may seem to have subsided in the United States. Many other countries have been concerned with end-of-life issues, including Canada, the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Scandinavian countries, but the change is most evident in the United States. This chapter looks at the ways in which new strategies of political and legal activism by both proponents and opponents of legalization are tending to escalate the debate. It examines the controversy surrounding an Oregon legislation that would prohibit the dispensing or distribution of scheduled drugs for the purpose of causing, or assisting in causing, the suicide or euthanasia of any individual. It discusses a series of methods of producing death that can be employed without the assistance of a physician and without prescription-controlled drugs, though they will still assure a gentle, easy death. These techniques are generally referred to as “self-deliverance new technologies,” or “NuTech”.

This chapter frames drug detainees’ experience in a more general context of the policing of ‘targeted populations’. In China, all released prisoners, including those discussed in this study, are categorized as ‘targeted populations’. Different policies are made to manage, control, and obtain information about such ‘targeted populations’. Since most of these former prisoners were incarcerated because of drug use, many of these control techniques are concerned with the control of former and current drug users. With the example of four control techniques, it demonstrates how the concern for control hijacks the concern for education and reintegration and destroys the police’s image of ‘benevolent saviours’.

This chapter explores how Afghan drugs expanded into British India during the later half of the 19th century. By analyzing two Afghan rulers, Abdur Rahman Khan and Amanullah Khan, this chapter demonstrates that Afghans established a system which encouraged the smuggling of opium and hashish out of Afghanistan and into British India, but put harsh penalties on the use and trade within the country. It also explains why this was significant given the broader landscape of events; Afghan drugs were increasingly smuggled into South Asia while British India moved toward restricting the production and trade of drugs. Ultimately, this chapter details how Afghan drugs entered markets in South Asia and beyond, but as a result, Afghanistan was also drawn into international dialogues over the illicit drug trade and drug control.

This chapter further examines former prisoners’ experiences in the early phase of their imprisonment. With the example of the prison culture of ‘initiation ceremonies’, it argues that prison officers’ concern of maintaining control and order in the prison goes beyond producing the form of structural hypocrisy discussed in the previous chapter and actually forces former prisoners to act in hypocritical ways themselves. What should have been a process of learning and rehabilitation through education turns instead into a veritable culture of hypocrisy.

This chapter describes the convergence of policing and profitmaking as the state demobilized wartime pharmaceutical surpluses and devised a drug-control regime that remobilized them for defense. Heeding the government’s call for a state of permanent war-readiness, the pharmaceutical industry and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics collaborated to secure and stockpile strategic defense materials while limiting legal participation within the drug marketplace. This helped to enshrine a new economic order that facilitated U.S. replacement of European colonial might in the world economy. Drugs—and commodities derived from them, like Coca-Cola—became both exemplars and emissaries of the material benefits of integration into a global capitalist system as the United States squared off with the Soviet Union in a burgeoning Cold War.