Monthly Archives: July 2013

After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation

‘After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’
October 2009.

Things at Transform have been hectic recently as we prepare to publish our new book ‘After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’ which will be launched on November 12th in the UK Houses of Parliament. 

The book is also being launched in mainland Europe, North and South Americas, Australasia and Asia. 
There is a growing recognition around the world that the prohibition of drugs is a counterproductive failure. However, a major barrier to drug law reform has been a widespread fear of the unknown – just what could a post-prohibition regime look like?

For the first time, ‘Blueprint’ answers that question by proposing specific models of regulation for each main type and preparation of prohibited drug, coupled with the principles and rationale for doing so. 

We demonstrate that moving to the legal regulation of drugs is not an unthinkable, politically impossible step in the dark, but a sensible, pragmatic approach to control drug production, supply and use.

‘Blueprint’ – available to download from our website. 

http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blueprint%20download.htm

Translations of the executive summary will also be available in Spanish and Portuguese. 

Heroin Century

En af de bedste og mest detaljerede bøger om heroin – virkelig læseværdig:

Heroin Century

Af Tom Carnwath, Ian Smith

http://tinyurl.com/8q3kvx

Heroin first saw the light of day a century and a quarter ago in a laboratory in Paddington Station, London. Since then it has spread across most parts of the world in fits and starts, temporarily held up here or blocked there, but pushing on with a persistence that has eventually overcome all obstacles. Despite the reach of heroin, the information on which public debate about heroin is based is quite often wrong.
Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith have written The Heroin Century to set the record straight. Their fascinating account of the development and use of this twentieth-century drug provides a wealth of factual information alongside some informed insights into the future for heroin in the twenty-first century. Topics include: methods of heroin production and distribution; types of heroin and methods of consumption; government attempts to control the spread of heroin; patterns of heroin use; heroin and its relationship to creativity; physiological and medicinal effects of heroin; the relationship between heroin and crime; and treatments for heroin use.

Flere oplysninger

Heroin Century
Af Tom Carnwath, Ian Smith
Edition: illustrated
Udgivet af Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415278716, 9780415278713
216 sider

Shooting Up Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs

Terrorism, Transnational Security Threats, Counternarcotics Policy

Vanda Felbab-Brown, Brookings Institution Press 2009 c. 273pp.

Cloth Trade, 273 pages
978-0-8157-0328-0, $28.95

Your online order will be processed by The Hopkins Fulfillment Service.

Most policymakers see counterinsurgency and counternarcotics policy as two sides of the same coin. Stop the flow of drug money, the logic goes, and the insurgency will wither away. But the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrongheaded, as Vanda Felbab-Brown argues in Shooting Up.

Counternarcotics campaigns, particularly those focused on eradication, typically fail to bankrupt belligerent groups that rely on the drug trade for financing. Worse, they actually strengthen insurgents by increasing their legitimacy and popular support.

Felbab-Brown, a leading expert on drug interdiction efforts and counterinsurgency, draws on interviews and fieldwork in some of the world’s most dangerous regions to explain how belligerent groups have become involved in drug trafficking and related activities, including kidnapping, extortion, and smuggling. Shooting Up shows vividly how powerful guerrilla and terrorist organizations—including Peru’s Shining Path, the FARC and the paramilitaries in Colombia, and the Taliban in Afghanistan—have learned to exploit illicit markets. In addition, the author explores the interaction between insurgent groups and illicit economies in frequently overlooked settings, such as Northern Ireland, Turkey, and Burma.

While aggressive efforts to suppress the drug trade typically backfire, Shooting Up shows that a laissez-faire policy toward illicit crop cultivation can reduce support for the belligerents and, critically, increase cooperation with government intelligence gathering. When combined with interdiction targeted at major traffickers, this strategy gives policymakers a better chance of winning both the war against the insurgents and the war on drugs.

Heroinberoende

Af Johan Kakko

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Utgiven:
2011-01-01
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Heroinberoende förklarar mekanismerna bakom heroinberoende och hur en framgångsrik behandling kan se ut. Vi vet att heroinberoende leder till en medicinsk störning som rubbar hjärnans stressreglering, en störning som kan behandlas effektivt med underhållsbehandling. Här redovisas hur denna behandling med fördel kan bedrivas.

Boken är indelad i tre delar där del 1 ger de nödvändiga neurovetenskapliga grunderna, del 2 tar upp underhållsbehandling och del 3 belyser problematiken ur både ett brukar- och anhörigperspektiv. Ett kapitel tar även upp den komplicerade frågan om underhållsbehandling vid graviditet.

De allra senaste vetenskapliga rönen inom underhållsbehandling av heroinberoende presenteras och det ges en utförlig översikt av den internationella forskningen på området. Genomgången visar vilka de verksamma behandlingskomponenterna är och de vinster dessa skapar för både samhället och de drabbade. Priset gäller för varje separat artikel i serien.

http://www.bokus.com/bok/9789147099283/heroinberoende/

Bruce Alexander’s Globalization of Addiction Website

Global society is drowning in addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits. This is because people around the world, rich and poor alike, are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and competition, dislocating them from social life.

People adapt to this dislocation by concocting the best substitutes that they can for a sustaining social, cultural and spiritual wholeness, and addiction provides this substitute for more and more of us.

History shows that addiction can be rare in a society for many centuries, but can become nearly universal when circumstances change – for example, when a cohesive tribal culture is crushed or an advanced civilisation collapses. Of course, this historical perspective does not deny that differences in vulnerability are built into each individual’s genes, individual experience, and personal character, but it removes individual differences from the foreground of attention, because societal determinants are so much more powerful. Addiction is much more a social problem than an individual disorder.

This site is about the relationship between addiction on the one hand, and global economic and political realities on the other. Documents, videos, audio recordings, and links may be submitted by anyone using the “contact” feature, and will be added to the site if they are relevant and carefully edited. This site was initially based on the work of Bruce K. Alexander, Ph.D., who is the site administrator.
http://www.globalizationofaddiction.ca/my-books/globalization-of-addiction.html

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“I do not easily give superlatives in my praise of books but this one is truly exceptional … I think that the study could prove of momentous importance in how we view the world in the 21st century. If only its message were to be taken to heart, we could spare an immense amount of human suffering. Professor Alexander delivers a convincing case that we are manufacturing addiction by the process of economic globalization and the social dislocation that inevitably goes with it.”
– Frederick M. Toates, Professor of Biological Psychology, Open University.

“Dear Mr Alexander,
I am presently reading your book titled Globalization of Addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit. As a person who was addicted to opiates for over 25 years (now over a decade without a physical dependence on opiates) I really felt your book provided an insight into addiction that I have never before seen in addiction literature (and I am in my fourth year of studying psychology, so have read a book or two on the subject). My interest on inequality and the distress that modern market societies produce was first aroused by the Spirit level book Why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
But it was only really after reading your book that my own experiences made sense. As an addict I was a continually preocupied with my self. This has continued even with the absence of drugs. Although I remain abstinent through personal choice i find myself just as much an addict as when I was physically addicted to heroin. I still have the same gnawing emptyness inside and a terrible desire for recognition and protaganism. This I do keep at bay using a spiritualy based 12 step program of which I am the typical grateful recovering addict as my present life cannot be compared to my former life. But I certainly do not feel cured and have never liked the desease model (please don’t tell my fellow 12 stepers ha ha) I always felt my addiction was adaptive and very much the way a obsessive compulsive person will wash their hands to cope with stress, I used heroin. Adaptive and functional…
I, of course like any self respecting addict seek fame, fortune and recognition in the addiction field and am continually disapointed that my word is not taken as gospel :) I have the pleasure of knowing several former physically dependent addicts who have left their physical addiction behind but have launched themselves into an equaly addictive behaviour in their new field Journalism or IT computers.
Anyway I’m going to leave it here, as you can see it is a subject that I find pasionate and could keep writing for hours in my obsessive addicted way.”
thank you so much, chris neill

“Professor Alexander’s work addresses important local and global issues, and gives another perspective on addiction. The intense disapproval it has generated should make thinking people want to take a look at just what he’s saying that could be perceived as so dangerous.”
– Chair, Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy Committee

Book Review by Teodora Groshkova
Bruce Alexander is best known for the ‘Park Rat’ experiments he conducted in the 1970s, in which drug consumption increased dramatically when laboratory animals were dislocated from their natural group. The present book sets out to draw out the implications of Alexander’s research for our understanding of addiction. Generally, the book challenges the construction of addiction as an individual, progressive, relapsing disease caused by drug use that can only be addressed by professional treatment. While this conventional perspective on addiction serves as a useful doctrine in some therapeutic situations, Alexander believes it is too focused on the individual—and is thus failing to cope with the rising flood of mass addiction that is enveloping the modern world. Read more…

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