NCJ Number
180413
Journal
British Journal of Criminology Volume: 39 Issue: 4 Dated: Autumn 1999 Pages: 477-487
Date Published
1999
Length
11 pages
Annotation
This opening paper in a special issue on "Drugs at the End of the Century," with attention to the United Kingdom, summarizes the nine papers presented under the topics of policing, public health, and community safety; crime control and harm reduction in the United Kingdom's drug strategy; and ethnography as an essential but threatened resource.
Abstract
The first article describes the impact of street-level law enforcement on Australia's principal heroin market, followed by an article that profiles an observational study of successful women drug dealers in Melbourne (Australia). The third article critiques the New York City Police Department's "zero tolerance" policy for dealing with minor offenses as an explanation for the striking reduction in homicide in that city between 1991 and 1997. The fourth article assesses the extent to which various identified trends converge with reports of heroin market participants operating on the streets of a large midwestern American city. A fifth article argues that surveys currently used in the United Kingdom for drug monitoring are "underpowered," followed by an article that presents an analysis of the survey data on drug use currently available to policymakers who formulate drug control policy in the United Kingdom. The seventh article considers issues of philosophy, practice, and policy in juvenile drug prevention. The next article reports on a study that documented patterns of MDMA (ecstacy) use in relation to other substance use as well as health and social problems related to ecstacy use in Glasgow, Scotland. The concluding article discusses new perspectives on drug surveys, as it comments on two previous articles in this issue on this subject. For the individual articles in this series, see NCJ-180414-21. 70 references