There's a (drug policy) storm coming

Abstract

We are currently witnessing a seismic shift within the global drug policy landscape. Some of these shifts have resulted from changes in global drug supply and demand. For example, new drugs have entered the market as a result of changes in the availability and purity of traditional, established drugs (European Monitoring Centre for Drugs & Drug Addiction, 2016); there are new ways of purchasing drugs, with the emergence of virtual currencies (Barratt & Aldridge, 2016); and the way we access drugs has evolved, thus that online drug markets have become established alongside traditional street-based markets (Cunliffe, Martin, Decary-Hetu, & Aldridge, 2017; van de Ven & Koenraadt, 2017). Some of these shifts have occurred because we now have good evidence to suggest that old ways of addressing the global 'drug problem' have failed; indeed, we are recognising that drugs are perhaps only a problem because we have framed them as such. The unending and political motivation of the 'war on drugs' means that we now must be prepared to acknowledge that we cannot arrest ourselves out of the problem that our policies have created.