While there have always been norms and customs around the use of drugs, explicit public policies--regulations, taxes, and prohibitions--designed to control drug abuse are a more recent phenomenon. Those policies sometimes have terrible side-effects: most prominently the development of criminal enterprises dealing in forbidden (or untaxed) drugs and the use of the profits of drug-dealing to finance insurgency and terrorism. Neither a drug-free world nor a world of free drugs seems to be on offer, leaving citizens and officials to face the age-old problem: What are we going to do about drugs? In Drugs and Drug Policy, three noted authorities survey the subject with exceptional clarity, in this addition to the acclaimed series, What Everyone Needs to Know®. They begin, by defining "drugs," examining how they work in the brain, discussing the nature of addiction, and exploring the damage they do to users. The book moves on to policy, answering questions about legalization, the role of criminal prohibitions, and the relative legal tolerance for alcohol and tobacco. The authors then dissect the illicit trade, from street dealers to the flow of money to the effect of catching kingpins, and show the precise nature of the relationship between drugs and crime. They examine treatment, both its effectiveness and the role of public policy, and discuss the beneficial effects of some abusable substances. Finally they move outward to look at the role of drugs in our foreign policy, their relationship to terrorism, and the ugly politics that surround the issue. Crisp, clear, and comprehensive, this is a handy and up-to-date overview of one of the most pressing topics in today's world. What Everyone Needs to Know® is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.
Illegal psychoactive substances and illicit prescription drugs are currently used on a daily basis all over the world. Affecting public health and social welfare, illicit drug use is linked to disease, disability, and social problems. Faced with an increase in usage, national and global policymakers are turning to addiction science for guidance on how to create evidence-based drug policy. Drug Policy and the Public Good is an objective analytical basis on which to build global drug policies. It presents the accumulated scientific knowledge on drug use in relation to policy development on a national and international level. By also revealing new epidemiological data on the global dimensions of drug misuse, it questions existing regulations and highlights the growing need for evidence-based, realistic, and coordinated drug policy. A critical review of cumulative scientific evidence, Drug Policy and the Public Good discusses four areas of drug policy; primary prevention programs in schools and other settings; supply reduction programs, including legal enforcement and drug interdiction; treatment interventions and harm reduction approaches; and control of the legal market through prescription drug regimes. In addition, it analyses the current state of global drug policy, and advocates improvements in the drafting of public health policy. Drug Policy and the Public Good is a global source of information and inspiration for policymakers involved in public health and social welfare. Presenting new research on illicit and prescription drug use, it is also an essential tool for academics, and a significant contribution to the translation of addiction research into effective drug policy.
Marijuana legalization is a controversial and multifaceted issue that is now the subject of serious debate. In May 2014, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a bill requiring the Secretary of Administration to produce a report about various consequences of legalizing marijuana. This resulting report provides a foundation for thinking about the various consequences of different policy options while being explicit about the uncertainties involved.
Debate around drugs and the policies, taxes, and regulations that surround them have left citizens and officials with questions on what can be done about both illicit drugs and marijuana. The foremost public and scholarly authorities on U.S. drug policy provide a truly balanced and comprehensive overview of the subject in this bundle containing Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know and Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know.
Should we legalize marijuana? If we legalize, what in particular should be legal? Just possessing marijuana and growing your own? Selling and advertising? If selling becomes legal, who gets to sell? Corporations? Co-ops? The government? What regulations should apply? How high should taxes be? Different forms of legalization could bring very different results. This second edition of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know® discusses what is happening with marijuana policy, describing both the risks and the benefits of using marijuana, without taking sides in the legalization debate. The book details the potential gains and losses from legalization, explores the "middle ground" options between prohibition and commercialized production, and considers the likely impacts of legal marijuana on occasional users, daily users, patients, parents, and employers - and even on drug traffickers.
The 2012 passage of Initiative 502 in Washington state removed the prohibition on the production, distribution, and possession of marijuana for nonmedical purposes and required the state to regulate and tax a new marijuana industry. This report uses data from multiple sources to estimate the total weight of marijuana consumed in the state in 2013 to provide decisionmakers with baseline information about the size of the state’s market.
In 1999, a scientific committee assembled under the auspices of the National Research Council issued a critique of RAND's 1994 Controlling Cocaine report. The committee concluded, [T]he findings of the RAND study do not constitute a persuasive basis for the formation of cocaine control policy. In the current document, RAND's Drug Policy Research Center rebuts the committee's claim. The Center shows that most of thecommittee's criticisms rest on an incomplete understanding of the model used in the RAND report or, when taken into account, do not result in important changes in the findings based on the model. The two remaining criticisms are that the data on cocaine treatment effectiveness are not adequate to support modeling and that the mode of price transmission down the cocaine production pipeline may be different from that assumed.The Center acknowledges these points as potentially valid but holds that models need not have negligible probability of error to be useful as decision aids.
School-based drug prevention, popular with the public and politicians alike, is now a nearly universal experience for American youth. Analysis has shown that the best programs can reduce use of a wide range of substances. But questions remain regarding how to think about and, hence, fund, these programs. Should they be viewed principally as weapons in the war against illicit drugs, or, at the other extreme, do prevention programs benefit students and society most by reducing use of alcohol and tobacco? The authors address these questions by comparing for the first time the social benefits of school-based prevention programs' long-run impacts on a diverse set of different substances.
Dynamic optimization is rocket science – and more. This volume teaches researchers and students alike to harness the modern theory of dynamic optimization to solve practical problems. These problems not only cover those in space flight, but also in emerging social applications such as the control of drugs, corruption, and terror. This volume is designed to be a lively introduction to the mathematics and a bridge to these hot topics in the economics of crime for current scholars. The authors celebrate Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle – that crowning intellectual achievement of human understanding. The rich theory explored here is complemented by numerical methods available through a companion web site.
Provides an intellectual framework for guiding prospective major donors in giving more effectively to higher education.Although most major gifts are profoundly motivated by charitable intentions, the noble impulse to give to higher education can quickly generate complicated choices. Which school? Which program? Under what terms or conditions? Even very talented people who have enjoyed exceptionally successful careers in business and other fields can become disoriented by academe_s idiosyncrasies. This book provides an intellectual framework for guiding prospective major donors in giving more effectively to higher education. It supplies some insight into the higher education sector, donor opportunities, the development process, and how to think about and get the most from a _negotiation_ with the institution of the donor_s choice. The insights and strategies are culled by a RAND research team mainly from interviews with development officers, institutional leaders, and donors themselves. Ultimately the giving process that works best for any donor will depend on his or her individual interests and needs. The best advice is to be clear on what effect the donor wants his or her gift to have, to seek as much information on the school/situation as possible, and to consult with an attorney and a good financial advisor at all stages of the giving process.
The Early Childhood Initiative (ECI) was an ambitious effort launched inPittsburgh in 1996 to provide high-quality early care and education servicesto at-risk children, on a countywide scale and under the direction of localneighborhood agencies. Its goal was to improve the preparation of thesechildren for kindergarten, promote their long-term educational attainment,and give them the early tools to help them become productive, successfulmembers of society. Initially funded by foundations and private donors, ECIplanned to become financially sustainable over the long term by persuadingthe state of Pennsylvania to commit to funding the program at the end of astartup period.Four years after its launch, ECI was far short of its enrollment targets,the cost per child was significantly higher than expected, and the effort tosecure a commitment of state funding had failed. ECI was therefore convertedto a small-scale demonstration program, leaving a residue of disappointmentin many communities around the county. Although findings from a parallelstudy suggest that participating children may have derived substantialbenefits from ECI, it failed to achieve its goals in terms of scale andsustainability.In the aftermath of ECI's scale-down, RAND was commissioned by the HeinzEndowments (ECI's largest funder) to study why ECI fell short of itsobjectives and to learn from its mistakes. The findings of the study arepresented in this report, which summarizes ECI's organizational history,analyzes and explains critical weaknesses that hindered ECI's ability tosucceed, and articulates lessons to inform the design and implementation offuture large-scale reform initiatives, whether in early care and educationor in other areas of social services.
Over the next decade, the United States is likely to face a flood of debate and state referendums proposing the legalization of marijuana production and use. This book will provide readers with a non-partisan primer about the topic, covering everything from the medical definition and benefits and negative consequences of using marijuana, to current laws around the drug, the likely consequences of legalization at the state and national levels, and ideas about the way that marijuana could be produced and regulated.
Discussions about reducing the harms associated with drug use and antidrug policies are often politicized, infused with questionable data, and unproductive. This paper provides a nonpartisan primer on drug use and drug policy in the United States. It aims to bring those new to drug policy up to speed and provide ideas to researchers and potential research funders about how they could make strong contributions to the field.
Presents a concise, accessible, objective view of where the United States has been, now stands, and is going in the future in its long "war on drugs." The authors assess the success of drug policies to date and review possible reasons why they have not been more successful. They recommend management of the drug problem for the long term, use of different policy levers depending on the situation, and tolerance of cross-state policy variation.
Analysis of the pilot programs suggested that six program attributes be considered in establishing or expanding such programs: rely on volunteers, keep individual programs to a modest size, design programs locally, provide central leadership, target programs for youth at high risk for drug abuse (but not the most troubled youth), and do not rule out short programs.
Substance use and drug policy are clearly in the national spotlight. Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that drug overdose deaths in 2018 exceeded 68,000, of which more than 47,000 involved opioids. Although heroin, prescription opioids, and synthetic opioids (such as fentanyl) receive most of the attention, deaths involving methamphetamine and cocaine are both on the rise. In addition, more than 25 percent of the U.S. population lives in states that have passed laws that allow for-profit firms to produce and sell marijuana for nonmedical purposes to adults ages 21 and older. To better understand changes in drug use outcomes and policies, policymakers need to know what is happening in the markets for these substances. This report updates and extends estimates of the number of users, retail expenditures, and amount consumed from 2006 to 2016 for cocaine (including crack), heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine in the United States, based on a methodology developed by the RAND Corporation for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The report also includes a discussion of what additional types of data would help quantify the scale of these markets in the future, including the new types of information produced by the legalization of marijuana at the state level.
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