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.
Drug Courts
Drug Courts
Specialised courts which work with treatment providers to encourage drug-involved offenders to participate in drug treatment, and divert them from traditional criminal justice interventions such as prison.
Drug courts were developed in the USA in response to the rising numbers of drug-involved offenders in the criminal justice system. These specialised courts offer drug treatment to eligible offenders whose successful participation in treatment allows them to avoid certain legal sanctions. The underlying objective of drug courts is to recognise that conventional courts may not deal with drug offenders in the best way and that a more effective way to reduce drug use, and in turn, drug-related crime is through a system specifically designed deal with such issues. The first drug court was implemented ...
