Summary
Contents
How do we understand drug use? How are drugs related to our social worlds? How should drug use be understood, approached and dealt with? Insightful and illuminating, this book successfully discusses drugs in social contexts. In an elegant manner, the authors bring together their different theoretical and practical backgrounds, offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary introduction that opens up a wide scientific understanding moving beyond cultural myths and presuppositions. Powerful and engaging, this book discusses main questions within the field of psychoactive drugs research, such as: Why do people take drugs? How do we understand moral panics? What is the relationship between drugs and violence? How do people's social positions influence their individual involvement in drug use? This is an invaluable reference source for students on criminology, sociology and social sciences programmes, as well as students and drug service practitioners in social work, social policy and nursing.
International Drug Control History/Prohibition
International Drug Control History/Prohibition
International drug control history charts the development of the current dominant approach – that of prohibition – to the global cultivation, production, distribution and consumption of particular intoxicating substances.
It is easy to forget in the contemporary climate of ‘drug control’ that global prohibition has not always been the dominant approach to human consumption of intoxicating substances. People have always taken what we now call ‘drugs’. There is a long tradition of cultivation, production and trading of intoxicating substances, with use not always having been considered problematic for individuals or societies. Our current international drug control system, with its global conventions, international strategies, national laws and domestic policies supervised by the United Nations (UN), has a much shorter history. ...
