Table of Contents

1. Starting Points: Drugs, Values and Drug Policy 2. ‘Afflictions of Inequality’? The Social Distribution of Drug Use, Dependence and Related Harms 3. Beyond the Tripartite Framework: The Subterranean Structuration of the Drug-Crime Link 4. Telling Policy Stories: Governmental Use of Evidence and Policy on Drugs and Crime 5. The Ideology of Exclusion: Cases in English Drug Policy 6. The Effects of Drug Policy 7. International Perspectives: Does Drug Policy Matter? 8. Towards Progressive Decriminalisation

About the Author

Alex Stevens is a Professor in Criminal Justice at the University of Kent. He has worked on issues of drugs, crime and health in the voluntary sector, as an academic researcher and as an adviser to the UK government, and has published extensively on these issues.

Reviews

'penetrating and insightful... [Stevens] strikes exactly the right balance between accessibility and critical depth and has produced a book that will deservedly attract a wide readership... I wish and hope that one or two presidents and prime ministers around the world end up reading a copy. Who knows what might happen then?' - Toby Seddon, British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 51 No. 4 (2011) 'This is an interesting, relevant and wide-ranging book written with passion. The central question of this book is why the poor and socially deprived bear most of the harms related to the use of illegal drugs, when the use of such substances is found in all sectors of society? To explore this question, Alex Stevens situates drug policy within the political economy of the distribution of power and resources in society. By doing this, he distances himself from the more drug centered conceptions of drug policy that dominate both academic literature and policy making. This opens for interesting perspectives on the role and the relevance of drug policy in the distribution of drug related harm.' -- Esben Houborg, Center for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, Denmark