To Build a Bridge: The Use of Foreign Models by Domestic Critics of U.S. Drug Policy (From Confronting Drug Policy: Illicit Drugs in a Free Society, P 194-225, 1993, Ronald Bayer and Gerald M. Oppenheimer, eds. - See NCJ-159507)

• NCJ Number: 159514
• Author(s): G M Oppenheimer
• Date Published: 1993
• Length: 32 pages
• Sale Source: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article discusses the reluctance of the U.S. government to consider foreign models when crafting its own drug enforcement policies.

Abstract

This phenomenon is significant both because the U.S. participate in numerous international conferences and recognizes the cross-national existence of drug trafficking and addiction, and because U.S. policy has failed to achieve its stated aims of reducing the demand and supply of illicit drugs. This essay considers two historical periods in which American critics of domestic policy successfully introduced discussion of foreign models into the policy discourse. During the post-World War II era, until the early 1970's, domestic critics suggesting adapting the British-style solution drug law enforcement: under this approach, addicts were not criminalized, heroin and morphine were seen as therapeutic agents, and addicts were encouraged to seek treatment. Beginning in the mid-1980's, the Netherlands was seen as a model for responding to the AIDS epidemic. 55 references