Legalization of Drugs

Guide for people involved in policy formulation, drug education, health care workers and those concerned with the effects of drug use. Provides information about the health and social dangers of illicit drugs, legal drug markets and organised crime. Discusses the possible effects of decriminalising the use, supply and sale of illicit drugs and provides information about international drug policy and United Nations Conventions. Includes a brief history of drug use, references, a bibliography and an index. Mofitt is a former Royal Commissioner examining the infiltration of organised crime into Australia. Malouf is president of the Australian Pharmacists Against Drug Abuse and Thompson is a magistrate with experience in both adult and children's courts.

Debates over the use and abuse of drugs, the laws controlling drugs in this country, and the question of whether or not certain drugs should be legally available have inflamed Americans since the 19th-century, and continue to flourish as America attempts to rage its "war on drugs." Students can trace the history and development of these arguments, as well as the reactions to them, through this unique collection of over 250 primary documents. Court cases, speeches, laws, opinion pieces, and other documents bring to life the controversies surrounding the issues. Explanatory introductions to documents aid users in understanding the various arguments put forth, while illuminating the significance of each document.

This timely handbook surveys the U.S. government's efforts to control illegal drugs. Inciardi and his contributors offer a useful way of thinking about and understanding the problem of illegal drugs, and provide the history of and research on drug policy so that policy makers have a necessary tool for developing a realistic and effective national drug policy.

In Our Right to Drugs, Thomas Szasz shows that our present drug war started at the beginning of this century, when the U.S. government first assumed the task of protecting people from patent medicines. By the end of World War I, however, the free market in drugs was but a dim memory, if that. Instead of dwelling on the familiar impracticality or unfairness of our drug laws, Szasz demonstrates the deleterious effects of prescription laws, which place people under lifelong medical tutelage. The result is that most Americans today prefer a coercive and corrupt command drug economy to a free market in drugs. Szasz stresses the consequences of the fateful transformation of the central aim of U.S. drug prohibitions from protecting us from being fooled by "misbranded" drugs to protecting us from harming ourselves by self-medication-defined as "drug abuse". And he reminds us that the choice between self-control and state coercion applies to all areas of our lives, drugs being but one of the theaters in which this perennial play may be staged. A free society, Szasz emphasizes, cannot endure if its citizens reject the values of self-discipline and personal responsibility and if the state treats adults as if they were naughty children. In a no-holds-barred examination of the implementation of the War on Drugs, Szasz shows that under the guise of protecting the vulnerable members of our society--especially children, minorities, and the sick--our government has persecuted and injured them. Leading politicians persuade parents to denounce their children, and encourage children to betray their parents and friends--behavior that subverts family loyalties and destroys basic human decency. And instead ofprotecting blacks and Hispanics from dangerous drugs, this holy war has allowed us to persecute them, not as racists but as therapists--working selflessly to bring about a drug-free America. Last, but not least, to millions

Why does the administration continue to follow a drug policy of criminalization and enforcement? In this probing volume, Johns demonstrates that while the War on Drugs has been a failure in some respects, it has been highly successful in others--it has diverted attention from severe social problems, legitimated the virtual abandonment of the lower class, legitimated a vast expansion of U.S. state power and a consequent erosion of civil liberties, and furthered projections of U.S. power into Latin America. This book changes a trend in the literature by unmasking the real consequences of the Drug War.