Drugs, Trafficking and Criminal Policy: The Scapegoat Strategy (Waterside Press Criminal Policy)

Drugs, Trafficking and Criminal Policy is a survey of drugs policy which explores the actual nature of events by focusing on drug trafficking and drug traffickers. Penny Green demonstrates that the vast majority of people arrested, convicted and imprisoned for drug trafficking offences are low-level players-causing her to argue that scapegoating has played a central role in shaping the criminal justice drugs war. It is those people at the bottom end of the drugs trade who give substance to its ideology and reality. The author argues that unless drug control moves beyond its present emphasis-and beyond criminal policy and law enforcement into the arena of geo-political analysis, international poverty, Third World debt and domestic welfare-there can be no resolution to the human tragedy which the war on drugs has come to embody. Indeed, government discourse places drug control too high on the criminal justice agenda, given the true nature and scale of the 'drug problem'-and this is especially true with drug traffickers where British and other governments have for long fought 'a phoney war'. Drugs, Trafficking and Criminal Policy extends the conventional arena of inquiry and raises provocative and disturbing questions about contemporary policy and practice. Penny Green was formerly Director of the Institute of Criminal Justice at the University of Southampton and a Senior Lecturer in Law. She is the author of The Enemy Without: Policy and Class Consciousness in the Miners' Strike (1990) and editor of Drug Couriers: A New Perspective (1996).