Book Description

For half a century the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 has dominated ill-conceived approaches to the prohibition of drugs and the criminalisation of many offenders. Wilful blindness to scientific facts has distorted the dispensation of justice, prevented lifesaving investigation, sidelined critics and thwarted advocates of politically inconvenient drugs law reform. This once in an epoch review by experts from a range of disciplines, Drug Science and British Drug Policy shows how lawmakers and the media have ignored the scientific evidence to sustain badly founded rhetoric in favour of blanket bans, punishment and the marginalisation of opponents. Countless individuals (including the vulnerable, deprived, addicted and mentally ill) have therefore suffered unnecessarily. This, the most comprehensive critique of the 1971 Act yet, rests on the combined learning of leading medical, scientific, psychiatric, academic, legal, drug safety and other specialists to provide sound reasons to re-think half a century of bad law. A thorough examination of the 1971 Act which challenges long outmoded ideas. Demonstrating political and media distortions the book calls for fresh thinking and urgent reform. Drug Science and British Drug Policy is first-rate, in-depth and highly informed. Review ‘It is time to see the MDA 1971 for what it is: a bad law that has the opposite effect to that intended. The so-called war on drugs is lost. It could never be won. Let us replace this knee-jerk law with something rational, something evidence-based, something more humane.’— Rt Hon Norman Baker (From the Foreword).