The London-based IEA has produced a succinct overview of the negative effects of outlawing voluntary transactions generally, with contributions from a number of economic analysts covering recreational drugs, boxing, firearms, advertising, pornography, medicinal drugs, prostitution, gambling, sale of human organs for transplant, and alcohol in the USA's 'Prohibition' era. Each writer makes a cogent case for why the product or service in question should not be banned - with sometimes surprising statistics. In particular the chapter on handguns draws on homicide/violent crime rates from several countries that have introduced tough restrictions on gun ownership to produce graphs illustrating that the new laws have had no effect in achieving their aims. I suppose you could say that when weapons are outlawed, only the outlaws are armed. The pornograpy chapter first differentiates between child pornography, which is justifiably prohibitied essentially for for the same reasons are we have child labour laws, and adult 'obscenity', whose prohibition rests on much shakier arguments. It deals mostly with those examples of pornograpy which are 'degrading to women' rather than just arguably indecent, and explains how in Canada, where this distinction is used by the legal system, it is lesbian bookshops that bear the brunt of enforcement under the law - more generally, when put into practise, obscenity laws tend to be enforced discriminatorily against ethnic, political and other minorities, and, often, the very people they purport to protect. The chapter on recreational drugs provides a good economic analysis of the failure of prohibition - nothing that other books reccommended on this site don't do more fully, but the case is put into context as just one of many examples of the nanny-state claiming to know what's best for us. The chapter on alcohol prohibition is mostly a history of the period; the economic analysis is disappointingly short, and it would have been good to have included a section about those Islamic states which prohibit alcohol today, but other than that this is a well argued book; one that will likely leave you appalled at the naiveté those who think society's problems can just be legislated away.

Being evidently aimed at an academic audience, this is not an easy read by any means. It collates evidence from a wide array of sociological and psychological studies to buttress its radical conclusion - that 'addiction' as it is popularly understood is in fact largely a product of prohibition. I will attempt to paraphrase some of the ideas. We are reminded of the famous rat-in-a-box experiments that found that animals with a lever that delivered morphine, and another that delivered food, would continue to choose the drugged state over eating, even when starving. But there were less famous experiments that, instead of putting rats in solitary confinement in a sterile box, put them in a simulated natural environment with other rats, and this time they were far less likely to choose the morphine over the food, even when they had been deliberately habituated to the drug by the researchers. The observation that problematic heroin use in humans correlates with poverty and social deprivation would seem to find a neat parallel here. We are also informed just how much the results of surveys, interviews etc are influenced by the way the questions are asked, the setting, the demeanour of the interviewer; so much so, apparently, that you can never get truly accurate results just from asking people questions about their behaviour. Much is made of an experiment in Glasgow in which a group of heroin users were asked a set of questions by either a straight-laced researcher from the university, or by an interviewer who was known by his subjects as a fellow heroin user. While there is no way of knowing which interviewer got truer results, the subjects consistently described themselves as less in control, more 'addicted' to the straight interviewer, while telling the heroin-using interviewer that their drug use was more a matter of choice than necessity. This book contends that in a society which attaches so much moral opprobrium to the use of some drugs, people are more likely to report that they do it because they have a problem than because they want to, if by that they can avoid the censure of others - but that while this is a short-term advantage, it is a long-term problem, because the idea that addictive drugs deprive the user of control over his own actions becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. How much harder it is to stop using drugs if you come to believe that it is very hard. Davies is critical of the way treatment is offered to problematic drug (including alcohol) users. He observes the degree to which groups like Alcoholics Anonymous avoid seeking evidence of their own effectiveness, and seem to require clients to have religious faith in order to be successful. He also notes that most heroin 'addicts' are not, as is popularly imagined, people who would like to stop using but can't; rather they are people who enjoy it and don't want to stop using it, even when it is to their disadvantage. Therefore treatment which regards abstinence as the only measure of success is likely to be rejected by the majority of people it is ostensibly aimed at. My suspicion is that this book is less famous/notorious than one would expect largely because it is, as I said, a dense, academic text. However, anyone who is prepared to wade through it will find plenty of evidence to oppose prohibition of even the most addictive drugs.

McMafia - Seriously organised crime
Misha Glenny
Published 2009
ISBN 0099481251

I'd heartily reccommend this even to anyone with no interest in drug policy, such is its fascinating scope. Misha Glenny has travelled the world in search of Montengran cigarette smugglers, Russian oligarchs, Nigerian email scammers, Canadian cannabis farmers, Japanese Yakuza, Transnistrian trafficked women (how many people have even heard of that shadowy breakaway Moldovan border province?), Brazilian cyber-criminals, Chinese illegal migrants and more. Just about every chapter feels like it could be expanded into a whole book, which I suppose is testament to the vast network of organised crime that seemingly pervades every corner of the globe. Readers of this website will be particularly interested in what he has to say about the illicit drugs trade: here he focusses on the curious set of economic and geographical circumstances that have transformed the Canadian province of British Columbia into a huge cannabis farm: the decline of traditional logging and mining industries, coupled with vast space and plentiful hydroelectric power, means that cannabis, mostly cultivated in underground aeroponic factories, now accounts for a substantial portion of the province's GDP. We meet David Soares, the District Attorney for Albany County, New York, who is working to reform NY's draconian mandatory minimum sentence laws, and who has praised Canada's relative tolerance of cannabis use. We also encounter some of the victims of the ongoing chaos in Colombia, fuelled by cocaine prohibition. Glenny dissects some UK government statistics to show how ineffective the War on Drugs is, and comes to the inevitable conclusion that prohibition, far from making the world safer, is an extravagant gift to gangsters and terrorists.
I won't go into detail on the many other topics covered in this book; I'll just say it deserves to be widely read by anyone with an interest in the world we live in.

Forbidden Drugs
Philip Robson
Oxford University press 1999
ISBN: 0 19 2629557

Accurate account of what we know about recreational drugs. Includes details on the effects and dangers of individual drugs as well as good policy analysis and discussion.

Heroin: The failure of prohibition and what to do now
Francis Wilkinson (forward by Sir David Ramsbotham)
Centre for Reform 2001 (www.cfr.org.uk tel: 0207 222 5121)
ISBN: 1 902622 28 6

Detailed look at the public health and crime reduction benefits of effective regulation of the heroin market, by former Chief Constable Francis Wilkinson (also wrote the leaf and the law – see below).

Drugs: Dilemmas and choices
Royal College of Psychiatrists
Gaskell 2000
ISBN: 1901242447

Written by a multi-disciplinary group of experts, this book aims to stimulate informed debate about the possible alternatives to current failings.

High Time for Reform: Drug Policy for the 21 st Centuary
Edited by Selina Chen and Edward Skidelsky.
Social Market Foundation 2001
ISBN: 1874097895

A collection of ten critical essays on UK and international drug policy by a range of experts from the fields of history, psychiatry, social policy, philosophy and economics. It brings to bear a range of innovative ideas and perspectives on the problems facing Britain’s policy on drugs.

Drugs: Cultures, Controls & Everyday life
Nigel South
Sage 1998
ISBN: 0761952357

An overview of drugs and society. Topics addressed include: the debate over prohibition versus legalization; drug and dance cultures; drug use amongst young women; images of "race" and drugs; the strategy of policing drugs and controlling drug users; and drug control and sport.

From War to Work: Drug treatment, social inclusion and enterprise
Rowena Young
The Foreign Policy Centre 2002
ISBN: 1903558077

A detailed examinations of the drugs issue presenting a vision of how drug use can be safely managed, based on lessons from around the world.

Illicit Drugs: use and control
Adrian Barton
Routledge 2003
ISBN: 0415281725

This book moves beyond this single issue approach and locates illicit drug use in its wider context, with chapters on: the history of illicit drug use measuring the 'problem' legal and medical responses to illicit drug use the illicit drugs market drugs, crime and trends in drug policy. Drawing information from wide-ranging sources, Adrian Barton illuminates the complex nature and broad impact illicit drug use carries in its wake and provides an overview of the contemporary state of the drug 'scene'. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers working in the area of drugs and society.

Winning the war on drugs: to legalise or not?
Richard Stevenson
Institute of Economic Affairs 1994
ISBN: 0 255 36330 3

A more academic examination of the arguments for and against legalisation. Features contributions from Julius Merry, Peter Reuter, Micheal Farrel, and John Strang.

Despite the psychedelic exploding rainbows on the cover, this is piece of serious academic statistics-crunching. The main thrust of the book is that sociologists have of late come to the conclusion that over the course of the 1990s and early 21st century illicit drug use has become 'normalised' throughout the youthful population of the UK, in the sense that, while it may not be a majority activity, it is no longer confined to the fringes of society as it allegedly was during the 1960s and 70s. Shiner maintains that this is a false conclusion - that although there have been increases in the rates of drug use and social perception of drugs since the 60s, we are far from a situation where illicit drug use has become mainstream. After a brief run-through of the main sociology publications that have dealt with drug use, and the various 'deviancy theories' about what influences people to break the law, we are introduced to the scheme of drug classifications which the book uses. Rather than listing illicit drugs by legal classification or pharmacology, they are divided into three categories by patterns of use: a category containing only cannabis, as the most widely used illicit drug, and that which is most likely to be the only one someone has used; a category containing amphetamine, MDMA and various psychedelics (under the oddly misleading heading of 'hallucinants'), and a category containing cocaine, crack and heroin, though in fact the statistics relating to this category deal only with cocaine as the number of heroin or crack users who respond to surveys is so small. The majority of the book deals with statistics from the British Crime Survey and the Youth Lifestyles Survey, both of which (amongst other things) track their respondents' use of legal and illegal drugs over time against other indicators such as age, education, income, marriage etc. These survey responses are used to illustrate such points as the tendency for people to use a drug to be in proportion to its actual harmfulness, as opposed to its legal classification, and that, although many young people have used illicit drugs, for most it is a brief, tentative dabbling; regular, long term users are still very much a minority. A major factor in the rise of illicit drug use in post-industrial countries is identified as the 'night time economy' - the pubs and clubs that serve as a major source of entertainment and socialisation for young people who are now likely to enjoy an extended adolescence (the peak time for both licit and illicit drug use) before starting work and having children than previous generations. The surveys suggest that the same people who are likeliest to drink and smoke are also likeliest to use illicit drugs, as all of these tend to scale with one's levels of sensation-seeking. Drug use is also correlated with ethnicity and religious identification, with the most actively religious people being least likely to use drugs, and with members of ethnic minorities usually being under-represented in drug use statistics, contrary to what we are sometimes enouraged to believe. There is little in the way of policy recommendations, on the grounds that the case for more effective, harm-reducing regulation has already been made by many other writers; it is simply noted that the pursuit of punitive policies has failed to prevent the escalation of drug use, established criminological theories still have a useful role to play, and it is only by learning the lessons of the past that we can hope to avoid history repeating itself.
This book is likely to appeal largely to an academic audience; that said, it's surprisingly readable for such a statistics-heavy work, and contains much that would surprise the wider public.

This book proudly does what it says on the tin, making the case that since cannabis is associated with lower risks to users and wider society than alcohol, to the extent that people who are seeking intoxication choose alcohol over cannabis in response to the latter's illegality, government policy actively encourages greater overall drug-related harm. We begin with a comparison of the way the two drugs are represented in American popular culture, and a side-by-side look at the effects of each drug on the body and brain, describing the known risks of cannabis, but demonstrating that they are less severe than those of alcohol. There is the obligatory brief history of cannabis prohibition, and an analysis and de-bunking of the major claims made by those charged with defending its prohibition today. There follows a chapter about how the ongoing anti-cannabis campaign by governments and the media systematically turns some people from cannabis to alcohol (even if it is largely ineffective at minimising cannabis use), including the possibility that there are some parties who may be intentionally seeking to increase alcohol use at the expense of cannabis, such as those politicians whose campaigns are funded by the National Beer Wholesalers Association, and the next chapter details some of the health and societal consequences of this pro-alcohol bias. The final part of the book is an activist's guide to making the case for ending cannabis prohibition, including all the traditional arguments about the harms caused by, and ineffectiveness of, prohibition, but with a particular focus on arguing that, rather than seeking to add another vice to an already alcohol-ravaged society, legalisation would provide a safer alternative. There is an account of how the book's authors managed to organise and win voter initiatives to decriminalise cannabis at the city level in Denver, Colorado, and have it declared a lowest law-enforcement priority at state level, and there is a description, similar to that in Transform's Blueprint for Regulation, of how legal, regulated cannabis sales could work in practise. This is a book intended both to win over the skeptical, and equip those already aware of the need for reform with the arguments and techniques to make it happen. It can be argued that by deliberately portraying cannabis as less dangerous than alcohol it could work against the broader drug law reform movement which has to argue with regard to the more dangerous drugs that it is precisely because they are dangerous that they must be regulated. This may be so, but it is a book aimed at an American audience, for whom the vast gulf between the widespread popularity of cannabis and the ferocity with which its users are persecuted means that their approach to the drug is probably more of an urgent priority than it is for other Western nations. On its own terms as a single-drug campaign manual this is a concise, informative book; certainly worth recommending to anyone who currently favours cannabis prohibition.

From Chinese opium smokers at the start of the 20th century to Somalian khat chewers at its end, Canada has long been home to groups of people whose drug use has led them to be defined as a security threat, and who have been subject to repressive measures by the state. This book sets out to show how the way drug users have been portrayed in Canada has always been contingent on who has been regarded as speaking the truth about drugs, how Canadians have wished to see themselves, and how they have sought to position themselves relative to other countries, particularly the USA. A central theme in the book is the tension between the degree to which Canadian authorities are prepared to use repressive measures against drug users and the country's self-image as a liberal, progressive state sharing a border with a punitive, conservative one. It will be a surprise to some readers to learn that Canada was at the forefront of prohibitionist lawmaking in the early 20th century, and that less has changed since than many Canadians would like to believe. Several subject areas are discussed in the light of this: the popular perception of the relationship between drug use and race, which in the early part of the 20th century was overtly racist in seeing ethnic minorities as a threat to the morals and health of white Canadians, now manifests itself as a sort of cultural racism, whereby Canada cannot claim to be an inclusive multicultural society if it persecutes ethnic minorities simply because they are ethnic minorities, but it can and does limit its inclusiveness non-politically threatening cultural practices such as cuisine, music and dance, while still portraying, say, Somalian-Canadians who abstain from using khat as more enlightened, or at least more welcome in Canada, than those who continue to use it despite it's contraband status. The process leading up to the decriminalisation of cannabis for medical purposes is also discussed, and again there is a discrepancy between the degree to which Canadians can claim to be living in a more liberal society than the USA after Canada's federal government was forced by the courts to intorduce its Marihuana Medical Access Regulations in 2001, and the fact that it remains very difficult for patients to actually receive medicinal cannabis, and the state still pursues a punitive approach to non-medical use. There is also an informative chapter on Canada's rave culture which sprung up in the 1990s and soon found itself demonised by law enforcement representatives for condoning MDMA use, and compelled to organise itself politically in defence. Again, the end result is a situation that looks more liberal on paper than on the ground; while a code of conduct for rave venues was created, so much power was left in the hands of the police in determining how many officers to assign to an event (and charge the organisers for) that the law enforcement community is effectively able to make legal raves economically unviable. All the while, the book seeks to demonstrate how the policy options that could legitimately be debated regarding drug use have been constrained by the public attitudes about drug users. Unfortunately, much of the early part of the book is phrased in the densely structured, obscure-word-laden language of the post-modernists, making it difficult to follow the sentence structure, let alone the argument. I'm sure it could have been expressed concisely and clearly, but probably the author is just following the fashion in academic circles, rather than willfully seeking to obscure the message. At any rate, once we hit chapter 4 the text becomes comprehensible, so don't be put off; this is a book that has a worthwhile contribution to make to the study of how defining behaviour or persons as a security issue shapes the very way a country can define itself.

Drugs, Trafficking and Criminal Policy: The scapegoat strategy
Penny Green
Waterside press 1998
ISBN 1 872 870 33 3

Academic examination of international drug trafficking, and the failure of enforcement. focuses on scapegoating low level players.

Drug Crazy: How we got into this mess and how we can get out
Mike Gray
Random House 1998
ISBN 0 679 43533 6

I'm told this is the book that the American branches of Students for Sensible Drug Policy recommend to skeptics as their standard reading material, and justly so, as it is one of the most engaging and readable accounts of the history of, and ills caused by, prohibition that I have yet encountered. The book starts with a dramatic account of undercover police in Chicago busting crack dealers, with a shoot-out, a car chase and eventually a trial at a court where they have such a backlog of drugs cases that they have had to introduce a night shift. All this is compared with the same city in the 1920s under the criminal reign of Al Capone, a parallel that underpins the book. The history of the USA's entry into prohibition of opiates, alcohol, cannabis and other drugs is told in detail, with some interesting characters along the way, such as Charles Towns, a bogus doctor who managed to convince influential people he had a cure for addiction at just the time prohibition was being debated, such that the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed in the belief that drug dependency could be undone (and therefore heroin maintenance was unnecessary and immoral), Dr William Halstead who proved that it was possible to be a morphine addict for over 40 years and still be one of the greatest surgeons of his day, and of course Harry Anslinger whose power as chief of the Bureau of Narcotics allowed him to suppress honest research about cannabis for decades. The ramping up of penalties and erosion of civil liberties by the Nixon and Reagan administrations are described, their statistical duplicity unpicked and the phenomenon of 'crack babies' debunked before the real horror show begins: the violent rise of cocaine-dealing cartels in Colombia and Mexico, the atrocities committed against honest government, police and judicial officers and innocent bystanders, and the enormous sums of money paid in corruption. A short chapter deals with the spread of this dirty money north of the Mexican border and into the hands of US Border Patrol agents, and spells out just how impotent the US interdiction efforts are to stop more than a small fraction of contraband entering the country. The 'how to get out' portion of the book is somewhat shorter, looking at heroin maintenance in Liverpool in the 1990s, and Amsterdam's de facto decriminalisation of cannabis, and the bizarre refusal by prohibitionists to consider that the medical utility of cannabis might be anything other than a hoax. It ends with a look at some of the tentative signs of change (which have continued to emerge in the decade since this book was written). With its narrative style, focussed on the individual people responsible for or affected by prohibition, this book tells a compelling story. Though written primarily for an American audience, most of what it has to say is global in reach. It might have benefitted from some material on the moral arguments against prohibition for those who are still convinced that prohibition is the right policy despite its effects, but for a critical exposé of US drug policy it would be hard to beat.

Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure
Dan Baum
Little Brown 1996
ISBN 0-316-08446-8

Another well researched and argued critique of the US war on drugs.

White-out: The CIA, Drugs and the Press
Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St.Clair
Verso 1999
ISBN 1-85984-258-5

An astonishing book that gives a detailed chronicle of the involvement of the CIA in various covert operations involving drugs, including links with the mob, former Nazi’s, Afgan heroin lords, and Colombian cocaine barons. Exhaustively researched and referenced to silence any “cries” of conspiracy theory. Also examines CIA efforts to silence the media and stifle critical coverage.

Drug War Heresies
Robert MacCoun, Peter Reuter
Cambridge University Press 2001
ISBN: 052179997X (or hardcover 0521572630)

This is a fine piece of scholarship with no easy answers for anyone. Focussing on what policies ought to be implemented in the USA, the authors pay little attention to the morality or otherwise of prohibition or
legalization; instead, they present a well-researched review of the likely consequences of different legal regimes with regard to different drugs (focussing on cannabis, cocaine and heroin as the most 'important' illegal substances). They draw analogies with the USA during alcohol prohibition, during the period when cocaine and heroin were legally available, and the experiences of those states that have to some extent decriminalized possession of cannabis. They also examine the consequences of the USA's legal approach to gambling (once illegal, now largely legalized) and prostitution (still illegal but with very different enforcement approaches compared with drug use). Various European regimes are considered, particularly the Dutch decriminalization of first use and then sales of cannabis. From all these they make the prediction that removal of criminal penalties for drug use is unlikely to result in an upsurge in users, but legalization of sales probably will (because it will be difficult to restrain the forces of commercialization, and because some people are deterred by the 'symbolic threshold' of a drug being de jure prohibited, even if the state has decided to stop enforcing that prohibition). They look at various harm reduction measures that have been tried, such as heroin maintenance, needle exchanges and treatment as an alternative to prison, consider why the US is so politically hostile to even allowing experimental harm reduction programmes, and try to evaluate whether under decriminalization or full legalization the aggregate harms to society or the average harms to users may decrease even if the total number of users rises. As they make clear at the very start, their conclusions are essentially that we don't know; to attempt a calculation would be to multiply uncertainties with uncertainties, therefore anyone who makes a strong prediction should be treated with skepticism. However, given the manifest existing harms created by prohibition, they come down tentatively in favour of some measure of reform.

Lies, Damned Lies and Drug War Statistics
Mattew Robinson & Renee Scherlen
Published 2007
ISBN: 079146976X

'Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics is surprisingly easy to read, and Robinson and Scherlen have done a huge favor not only to critics of current drug policy by compiling this damning critique of ONDCP claims, but also to anyone interested in how data is compiled, presented, and misused by bureaucrats attempting to guard their domains. It should be required reading for members of Congress, though, sadly, that is unlikely to happen.'
Stopthedrugwar.org

After Prohibition: An adult approach to Drug Policies in the 21 st Century
Editor: Timothy Lynch with foreword by Milton Friedman
Published: 2001
ISBN: 1-882577-94-9

This is not, as the title would suggest, a book proposing how a newly legalized drugs industry should be run, rather it is an interesting collection of essays from a wide variety of authors, mostly criticising the consequences of the war on drugs in the USA. There are chapters detailing how prohibition is itself (in a technical, legalistic way) illegitimate according to the US Constitution, and how in the course of recent decades it had been used as the justification for removing pretty much all of the rights that the Constitution used to guarantee, from protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, to the separation of the military from the police, even up to the right to a fair trial. There is a chapter by Gary Johnson who, as Governor of New Mexico, has been one of the highest level US politicians to call for legalization (and has an entertainingly gung-ho writing style), and several by former or current police officers, including one by Michael Levine which is worth mentioning in detail. He is dead set against legalization, but after years of fruitlessly trying to stop the flow of drugs by focussing on arresting dealers, he started to formulate a demand-side approach that aimed to organise local police and citizens' groups into scaring/shaming drug buyers, making it clear that they, not the dealers, were being targeted. Whether or not this approach would have worked long term, or across a whole country, his initial experiments with his 'Fight Back' programme seem to have been very successful in putting local drug dealers out of business. The point is that Levine soon found his apparently effective demand-reduction approach being opposed by precisely those bureaucracies whose continued existance depends on inefficient supply-reduction policies, with police officers telling him that pressure was being put upon them not to cooperate with 'Fight Back' - a telling revelation of who benefits from the war on drugs.
The final two chapters are a 'debate' about legalization, but they seem rather out of place in the book since neither writer has space to argue their side in the depth it deserves, and since most of the rest of the book is already about the evils of prohibition.

Drugs and Security in the Caribbean
Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith
Published 1997
ISBN: 0-271-01719-8

'A comprehensive study of the drug dilemma in the Caribbean that reveals the severity of the threat illegal drug trafficking poses to the small countries of that region'.
Drugs and Security in the Caribbean

The Political Economy of Narcotics
Julia Buxton
Published 2006
ISBN: 1842774468

The Political Economy of Narcotics "aims to break new ground in integrating the study of history, ideology, institutions and policy", and by its own criteria does rather well. The book begins with a brief historical overview of drug use and an account of the main events leading from the unregulated free market of the 19th century to the global prohibition regime that holds sway today under the auspices of the United Nations, with the USA at the forefront of the push for ever more repressive legislation. Then, while acknowledging the difficulty of gathering accurate information about an illegal activity, the next section gathers the available statistics on the prevalence of use and cultivation of the major illicit drugs, divided by continent, over recent years. Here Buxton is able to let the numbers do the talking, since, despite all the efforts of the international drug control system, both use and production, when considered globally, show an upward trend.
The following two chapters analyse the reasons for the failure of prohibition, in terms of its inherent utopianism and in terms of the failure of the control system to learn from experience. The remainder of the book focuses on particular areas in which the war on drugs has harmful effects, namely, on the political systems of producer countries, on efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, and on the environment, including a critique of the proposed biological warfare tactic of using a fungus to attack drug crops.
The meticulous laying out of statistics makes for somewhat dry reading at times, and the sheer volume of history and analysis presented lead to some topics feeling a bit rushed. Also, there are a few pervasive linguistic infelicities, such as using the words 'narcotics' and 'stimulants' as if they meant all illicit drugs, and comparing alcohol and tobacco with 'drugs' as if they were not included in the meaning of that term. Overall, though, the book does a good job of exposing the failure of prohibition and explaining how it has managed to persist for so long.

Legalize This! The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs
Douglas Husak
Published 2002
ISBN: 1859843204

As in his earlier Drugs and Rights Husak is concerned above all else to show that punishing people for using drugs is unjust, whether or not their drug use (or the laws prohibiting it) leads to negative consequences. Indeed, in one of the later sections he explicitly argues that a cost/benefit analysis
is an inappropriate way of deciding whether current prohibition laws should be repealed. He starts from the reasonable assertion that if punishment is to be inflicted, it ought to have a personal justification - that is to say, that it's not sufficient to show that it will be better for society if an individual is punished, but that individual must deserve it for some evil he has done.
He identifies the most plausible reasons for prohibiting drug use and shows how in each case the evils that prohibition seeks to prevent do not constitute a sufficiently dire emergency to allow us to override justice in pursuit of our aims. It is noted that when all their other arguments have been dealt with, prohibitionists tend to fall back on legal moralism - that the law is justified in enforcing private morality and that drug use is inherently immoral - a position which usually turns out to rest on religious
conviction, which in a secular society ought to be insufficient reason to imprison people.
Finally he shows how despite much talk from both sides, we cannot with very much confidence predict what society would look like if we legalized the use of drugs. He does not try to offer a model system for legalization, but he makes a strong case that whatever the consequences (and whether or not we
should legalize the sale of drugs), criminalizing non-violent drug users is morally wrong.
This is a much shorter and more accessible read than his previous book on the topic; an essential introduction to the rights-based case for decriminalization.

Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics
Curtis Marez
Published 2004
ISBN: 0816640602

'Inaugurated in 1984, America's "War on Drugs" is just the most recent skirmish in a standoff between global drug trafficking and state power. From Britain's nineteenth-century Opium Wars in China to the activities of Colombia's drug cartels and their suppression by U.S.-backed military forces today, conflicts over narcotics have justified imperial expansion, global capitalism, and state violence, even as they have also fueled the movement of goods and labor around the world'.
Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics

The Globalisation of Addiction
Bruce Alexander
Published 2008
ISBN: 0199230129

'This book explores the problem of addiction using a nontraditional approach...a refreshing look at an age-old problem.'
The Globalisation of Addiction

McMafia: Crime without Frontiers
Misha Glenny
Published 2008
ISBN: 0224075039

I'd heartily reccommend this even to anyone with no interest in drug policy, such is its fascinating scope. Misha Glenny has travelled the world in search of Montengran cigarette smugglers, Russian oligarchs, Nigerian email scammers, Canadian cannabis farmers, Japanese Yakuza, Transnistrian trafficked women (how many people have even heard of that shadowy breakaway
Moldovan border province?), Brazilian cyber-criminals, Chinese illegal migrants and more. Just about every chapter feels like it could be expanded into a whole book, which I suppose is testament to the vast network of organised crime that seemingly pervades every corner of the globe. Readers of this website will be particularly interested in what he has to say about the illicit drugs trade: here he focusses on the curious set of economic and geographical circumstances that have transformed the Canadian province of British Columbia into a huge cannabis farm: the decline of traditional logging and mining industries, coupled with vast space and plentiful hydroelectric power, means that cannabis, mostly cultivated in underground aeroponic factories, now accounts for a substantial portion of the province's GDP. We meet David Soares, the District Attorney for Albany
County, New York, who is working to reform NY's draconian mandatory minimum sentence laws, and who has praised Canada's relative tolerance of cannabis use. We also encounter some of the victims of the ongoing chaos in Colombia, fuelled by cocaine prohibition. Glenny dissects some UK government statistics to show how ineffective the War on Drugs is, and comes to the
inevitable conclusion that prohibition, far from making the world safer, is an extravagant gift to gangsters and terrorists.

I won't go into detail on the many other topics covered in this book; I'll just say it deserves to be widely read by anyone with an interest in the world we live in.

Drug Control in a Free Society
James Bakalar & Lester Grispoon
Published 1988
ISBN: 0521357721

‘This is a landmark book, destined to be regaled and harangued by many : should be read by a wide group of individuals, including members of the legal, political, medical, and drug abuse fields. Its views will irritate some and please others but, like the question of mind-altering drugs themselves, should give us all much to reflect on.’
Journal of the American Medical Association

Modernising Australia's Drug Policy
Alex Modak & Tim Moore
Published 2002
ISBN: 0868404829

'Written by two experts in the field, this book is about the options for Australia when the law enforcement approach is finally exhausted. - It includes a ten-point plan to reduce the death, disease, crime and corruption that has become an entrenched part of the drug economy, and concludes with a call for a new realism in Australian drug policy.'
Amazon

Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century
William McAllister
Published 1999
ISBN: 0415179904

'An excellent history of how and why international institutions controlled drugs...historians of both the drug trade and international institutions will rely on his work for years to come.'
The International History Review, December 2002

Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations
Peter Andreas & Ethan Nadelmann
Published 2008
ISBN: 0195341953

'Every serious student of international organized crime in particular and international crime control in general should make the reading of Policing the Globe by Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann a priority.'
Michael Woodiwiss, International Criminal Justice Review

Between Politics and Reason: The Drug Legalization Debate
Eric Goode
Published 1997
ISBN: 0312163835

In this book Erich Goode gives an overview of drug use and abuse in America to give students a solid understanding of the issues and problems. Key arguments in the drug legalization debate are placed in a social and political perspective, with implications for current debates beyond the US.
Amazon

The Legalization of Drugs: For and Against
Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe
Published 2005
ISBN:0521546869

As the general preface states, the 'For and Against' series is intended to form a library of applied ethics, with each book containing an argument from both sides of a debate, put as forcefully and coherently as possible. Unfortunately, the two authors here are rather talking at cross-purposes. Husak is concerned mainly to argue from principles of justice that punishment should not be inflicted on people for recreational drug use, whereas de Marneffe is mostly concerned with explaining why prohibition of manufacture and sale of some drugs is ethically justified. Indeed, Husak's section is largely an abridged and updated version of his earlier Legalize This!, reviewed elsewhere on this site, which argues that imposing criminal sanctions on someone is only justified if they can be shown to have violated someone else's right (or unacceptably raised the risk of this happening), and that drug use does not fit this category. It features just a short extra
chapter explaining why he believes that the laws surrounding production and sale of drugs should be set up so as to minimise harm.
De Marneffe's argument is based on different axioms; that as long as someone's reasons for wanting (say) heroin to be prohibited are stronger than anyone else's reasons for wanting it to be legalized, then prohibition is justified. He does indeed make a strong case if we accept this idea, and his other assertion, namely that prohibition has a significant deterrent effect (which he believes, but concedes he cannot prove). However, what is telling about this book is that, given that the series editors presumably
chose de Marneffe as the best writer to make the ethical case for prohibition, the scenario he supports is so very different from that which currently prevails. In particular, he is prepared to support prohibition of
heroin, alcohol, cocaine and the amphetamines, but not cannabis, MDMA or the psychedelics. He also holds that penalties should be 'proportional and gradual' - i.e. nothing like as severe as is often the case today.
Another refreshing observation is that he does not base his support for heroin prohibition on its supposed addictiveness (which he breaks down into seven different elements in a neat analysis of a term that's often used too vaguely), but solely on its likelihood to present adolescents with a loss of opportunity to make something of their lives, or to prevent parents from taking the best care of their children. He also admits that in order to outweigh the harms caused by prohibition on opium-producing regions Western
governments would have to invest heavily in providing alternative economic opportunities, as well as increasing aid for eradication programmes (if such programmes can indeed be effective in the long term).

Both writers have a good deal of sense to say in this book, and neither has much to say in favour of the status quo. It would have been nice if it were a bit longer, because some of Husak's arguments were better fleshed out in his earlier work, but as a convenient-sized introduction to the moral dimensions of the debate it achieves its purpose.

Drug War Crimes
Jeffery A Miron
Published 2004
ISBN: 0945999909

This short book is written from a libertarian perspective; as such, one of the most salient disadvantages of prohibition is the infringement of people's liberty to choose to use drugs; not something that a supporter of
the status quo would put much weight on. The book examines the amount of money is currently spent enforcing prohibition, then looks at alcohol consumption in 1920s and 30s America as an illustration of how effective prohibition is at reducing the number of people who use a drug - in this case concluding that it does have some effect but that it is far more modest than modern drug prohibitionists tend to claim. Next comes an analysis of violent crime statistics throughout the 20th century, illustrating a positive correlation between the homicide rate and the amount of resources devoted to enforcement of prohibition (of either alcohol or other drugs).
Having argued that prohibition is too costly in money and lives to justify the modest amount of reduction in drug use it achieves, the author then considers whether reducing drug use is a sensible policy goal for a
government to seek to achieve in the first place. This is where Miron's libertarian credentials become clear. Under the assumption that most people are rational agents seeking to maximise their own welfare, people who choose to use a drug do so because they want to, and therefore any policy that seeks to prevent them goes against their interests, and the extent to which people are irrational in their choice of drugs is no greater than that associated with other goods which are not illegal. The conclusion is that preventing drug use is not generally a worthwhile policy goal, and even where it is, prohibition is a bad choice of way to achieve it. He reaches the same conclusion with several other possible policies under a legal regime - ie 'sin taxes', provision of treatment, bans on advertising, advocating a legal market no different from that involved in the sale of any other goods. This is bound to be too extreme a position for many who come to the legalization debate from a harm-reduction perspective to swallow, but the book is certainly a succinct statement of the logical libertarian position. That said, it's rather a breathless white-knuckle ride through a series of statistics and observations; the reader is whisked from starting point to conclusion with barely a moment devoted to any rhetoric to help the book's message sink in, which is probably something of an oversight when wring from such a controversial standpoint. Unlikely to win many converts, but the prohibition/violence ratio is well illustrated.

Drug War Facts
Douglas MVay
Published 2006
ASIN: B0011355C8

'Drug War Facts provides reliable information with applicable citations on important public health and criminal justice issues. Most charts, facts, and figures are from government sources, government sponsored sources, peer review journals, and occasionally newspapers.'
Drug War Facts

The Irish War on Drugs
Paul Mahony
Published 2008
ISBN: 0719079026

As a small, single-jurisdiction country whose patterns of illegal drug use have gone from almost nil in the early 70s to a thriving drug culture with fed by rampant criminal gangs today, Ireland represents an interesting, relatively easily-studied microcosm of the global drugs issues. It's evidently written with an audience who have no prior in-depth knowledge of drug prohibition issues in mind, as the first three chapters are devoted to, respectively, 1: the fact that the issue is more complicated than you'd think, 2: a description of the ideological base of prohibition, the conflicting ideology of a human-right-to-use-drugs perspective, and the pragmatic harm reductionism caught in the middle, and 3: a thorough unpicking of the various types of connection between drugs and crime. Readers may find these chapters somewhat dry, but the following chapters embark on an analysis of how the Irish government's approach to drugs has been implemented, and its effects. Particular focus is drawn to the difference between the straightforward prohibitionist approach from 1977's Misuse of Drugs act, and the harm reductionist measures that were implemented after 1996, a watershed year in which, partly in response to the murder of Veronica Guerin, an investigative journalist who was looking too closely into the activities of drug-dealing gangs, a wave of vigilante activism arose against suspected drug dealers, prompting the authorities to try to devise a more sophisticted response. The author presents crime and health data to support the view that Ireland's harm reduction measure have had a disappointingly limited effect, largely because in the discourse between prohibition and harm reduction the former usually trumps the latter. The second half of the book is where Paul O'Mahony comes into his own as a polemicist, bringing current scientific understanding of human psychology to bear on why prohibition is so ineffective at dissuading young people from drug use, and how by engendering secrecy and disinformation it has helped facilitate the spread of harmful patterns of drug use. He presents a passionate defence of the benefits of recognising a human right to use drugs as long as no one else is harmed, and enumerates the various rhetorical tricks and unfair advantages that prohibitionists currently have in public debate, so as his readers will know how to disarm them. Finally he makes his recommendations for how to elevate the anti-prohibitionist message above the noise of the status quo, suggesting that merely describing the gains to be made after legalisation is not enough; that only a human-rights-centred argument will provide enough of a rallying cry to attract enough people to make a difference. It's not the easiest read; the first few chapters particularly require wading through a lot of police data and other statistics, but it's a heartfelt argument cogently made, and should be of interest to the world outside of Ireland despite most of its data being so location-specific.

Drugs and Justice
M Battin, E Luna, A Lipman, P Gahlinger, D Rollins, J Roberts, T Booher
Published 2008
ISBN: 0195321014

'Drugs and Justice attacks a central problem in theory, policy and practice concerning drugs: the tendancy of health professionals, government, academics, medical scientists, social scientists, clinicians, and the public to compartmentalize thinking about "drugs".'
Drugs and Justice

Mama Coca
Antonil
Published 1978
ISBN: 0861660005

'With all the notoriety currently associated with cocaine, it is prehaps surprising to note how little attention has been directed at the coca leaf itself - source of the illicit white powder - and particularly at the real, as opposed merely sensational, dimensions of the cocaine industry and the so-called 'war on drugs' in South America.'
Mama Coca

Forces of Habit
David T Courtwright
Published 2002
ISBN:0674010035

This book is a history of what its author terms ‘the psychoactive revolution’, the set of circumstances by which the variety and availability of mind-altering chemicals increased vastly over the last several centuries, driven by profit, dependant on but also helping to fuel the expansion of ocean trading routes. The globalisation of distilled alcohol, tobacco and caffeine-bearing plants, the ‘big three’ as Courtwright puts it, as well as the ‘little three’ of opium, cannabis and coca, are considered in the early part of the book, along with the reasons for other drugs, such as kava, peyote and qat failing to become major global commodities. Sugar is also included as a sort of pseudo-drug, crucial in making spirits and in sweetening caffeine products. The book explores how all the major plant drugs have gone from limited medical use to popular consumption, how they have in many cases become a means of coping with the daily grind, and how technological progress in refinement and delivery systems (e.g. from beer to spirits, opium to heroin, chewing tobacco to cigarettes) raises the stakes in terms of potential for abuse. It also enumerates several different social forces that combined to push for prohibition of some drugs in the late nineteenth century, and the problems they faced in implementing it.

There are a few interesting case studies, such as India’s and the Soviet Union’s attempts at alcohol prohibition, and James Buchanan Duke’s rise to the top of a vast cigarette-producing empire. Finally, Courtwright attempts to analyse the current global drug policy and its likely future direction. He rather unfairly characterises the legalization movement as a ‘form of reactionary libertarianism… [which] would reset the policy clock by more than a hundred years’, and contrasts it with the harm reduction movement which faces formidable opposition but has the powerful weapon of AIDS on its side. Nevertheless he concedes that humanity’s prospects of becoming drug free are slim.
This book provides a good overview of how we arrived at a global free market in drugs, but less detailed on how we went from there to worldwide prohibition - the latter being better dealt with by Julia Buxton's The Political Economy of Narcotics

The Khat Controversy: v.4: Stimulating the Debate on Drugs
David Anderson, Susan Beckerleg, Degol Hailu, Axel Klein
Published: 2007
ISBN: 1845202511

'The Khat contoversy presents the first broad, international study of khat - from its value as a crop to local farmers and national economies, to its pharmacology and effects, to its use in a wide range of social rituals - and outlines how an international policy on khat might be best constructed.'
The Khat Controversy

Drugs and rights
Douglas N husak
Published 2008
ISBN: 0521427274

This book is a comprehensive, brick-by-brick dismantling of the hypothesis that the state has a right to impose criminal sanctions against drug users. While acknowledging the consequentialist arguments put forward by anti-prohibitionists that current drug laws probably cause more problems than they solve, Husak's concern is to establish that, apart from under exceptional circumstances, adults have a moral right to use any of the drugs currently known to exist. He examines all the major rationales that are given in favour of criminalization of drug use and in each case establishes that, although one could imagine a hypothetical drug in respect of which a policy of prohibition would be justified, none of the reasons are strong enough to criminalize the use of any drug that people currently do use - not even heroin or crack. Unfortunately the book is written more for the student of legal philosophy than the general public, using a certain amount of academic jargon (does anyone really need to write 'ceteris paribus' when 'other things being equal' is perfectly good English?) and is rather long. The result is a work which presents a sophisticated argument to those who are prepared to wade through it, but the people who most need to read it are probably going to be those least inclined to do so. If you are looking for a convenient book to recommend to someone unfamiliar who hasn't given the issue much thought, you would be better with a later book by the same author, Legalise This! The Case for Decriminalising Drugs. If, on the other hand, you know a supporter of prohibition who is versed in philosophy or jurisprudence and is open-minded enough to make the effort, then this book would be the one to point them to.

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Always Almost do Better
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 2009
ISBN: 1846140390

'The remarkable data this book lays out and the measure it uses are like a spirit level which we can hold up to compare the conditions of different societies.'
The Spirit Level

The Emperor wears no clothes: Hemp and the Marijuana conspiracy
Jack Herer
Green Planet Company
ISBN: 1878125028

The classic history of cannabis prohibition.

The Leaf and the Law: The case for the legalisation
Francis Wilkinson
Centre for reform 2001 ( www.cfr.org.uk tel: 0207 222 5121)
ISBN 1 902622 20 0

Detailed analysis of current cannabis policy, how we got here and the options for reform, from the former Chief Constable of Gwent. Includes analysis of international conventions.

Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century
Mike Jay
Dedalus Press 2000
ISBN 1-873982-48-8

A brilliant history of the origins of modern prohibitionist drug policy. A fascinating account of drug culture before prohibition.

The Atmosphere of Heaven
Mike Jay
Published 2009
ISBN: 0300124392

"At the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, England, founded in the closing years of the eighteenth century, dramatic experiments with gases precipiated a revolution not only in scientific medicine but also in the modern mind.

Propelled by the energy of maverick doctor Thomas Beddoes, the Institution was both laboratory and hospital - the first example of a medical research institution. But when its researchers discovered the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, their experiments devolved into a pioneering exploration of consciousness, with far-reaching and unforeseen effects.

In this fast-paced and dramatic narrative, Mike Jay tells the story of Dr. Beddoes and the brilliant circle who surrounded him: Erasmus Darwin and the Lunar Society, who supported his experiments; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, who were inspired by his ideas; James Watt, who designed and built his laboratory; Thomas Wedgwood, the visionary heir to the pottery dynasty, who funded it; and Beddoes' dazzling young chemistry assistant, Humphry Davy, who tested nitrous oxide to its limits with legendary results.

The Atmosphere of Heaven is a riveting account of the chaotic rise and fall of the Instituion, and reveals for the first time its crucial influence - on modern drug culture, attitudes toward objective and subjective knowledge, the development of anaesthetic surgery, and the birth of the Romantic movement."

The Pursuit of Oblivion
Richard Davenport-Hines
Published 2001
ISBN: 0753813718

"Intoxication is neither unnatural nor deviant,"quotes Hines, prizewinning writer and regular TLS contributor, at the start of his compendious chronicle, The Pursuit of Oblivion . This pretty much sums up his objective take on drug consumption although he is far less impartial on the policies surrounding the trade and legislation of the drugs industry. This fascinating book examines the history of changing Western social attitudes to drugs, their place in our culture and what they reflect of it.

High Society
Ben Elton
Published 2002
ISBN: 0552150533

'Ben Elton's new novel High Society initially appears to be a cautionary tale about Britain today, but its vision of a society totally in thrall to criminality has elements of the visionary novel about it. Happily, the state of the nation is not (yet) quite as awful as it's rendered in this terrifying kaleidoscope. We're taken into a world in which drug use holds total sway, and the whole world essentially functions as a single criminal network. From royalty and the upper crust to drug abusers and prostitutes--right across the social spectrum--we are (in Elton's unsparing universe) plunging into a criminal world.' Amazon