Abstract

The world now has a century of experience with refined cocaine and heroin and has observed their consequences. For most of that century, as many citizens in the industrialized nations experimented with those drugs, their governments experimented with various forms of legal prohibition. A few countries—most notably the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Switzerland—have been willing to test a wide range of control strategies. Most others—including the United States—have generally tinkered at the margins of a narrow criminal justice model, perhaps augmented with minimal provision of public drug treatment.

Some foreign experiences have long been a staple of the American drug debate—most notably the British experience with prescription heroin in the mid-twentieth century and Dutch de facto cannabis legalization since the late 1970s.In the absence of careful scholarly description,U.S.observers have been free to characterize such experiences in whichever way serves their rhetorical purposes. For example, a rapid increase in the minimal base rate of heroin use in Britain in the late 1960s became the basis for a charge that the British system of heroin prescription had failed; we discuss below a more reasonable interpretation of this experience.

Only recently have scholars,policy analysts,and policy makers from different nations begun to look outside their own boundaries to see what might be learned from experiences abroad (e.g., Estievenart 1995; MacCoun and Reuter 2001a, 2001b; Reuband 1995).

This special issue describes the experiences of eleven nations: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Iran, Jamaica, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, and Sweden. Each of these countries is confronting the various public health and public safety problems caused both by domestic drug consumption and by the legal prohibition of these substances. Some countries confront a second drug problem as well, one that can dwarf the first: they are home to major drug trafficking organizations. And several of these countries must contend with the direct and indirect effects of an aggressive U.S. campaign to stem the flow of drugs.

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