Book Review. Caulkins Jonathan P., Hawken Angela, Kilmer Beau and Kleiman Mark A. R. Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know

The book Marijuana Legalization: What everyone needs to know discusses whether marijuana should be legalized or not. The book deals with a topic which is relevant in the United States, especially after California\u2019s Proposition 19 nearly passed in 2010 and Colorado andWashington voters approved to legalize, regulate and tax marijuana in 2012. Further, recent publications witness how much the general public, academics and policy makers are sensible to the issue (Caulkins et al. 2012a; Kilmer et al. 2010; Room et al. 2008). The aim of the book is not to advocate for legalization neither prohibition, but to provide \u201cthe material needed to develop informed opinion [\u2026] and to sweep away some of the myths and fallacious arguments that have been offered on both sides of the debate\u201

Regulation as global drug governance: how new is the NPS phenomenon?

This work focuses on the lessons of efforts to internationalise prohibitions and regulation over the last century and what these mean for contemporary control efforts around novel psychoactive substances (NPS). In particular it will focus on the system of ‘scheduling’ and how it might be affected by the rapid emergence of NPS. The former was designed as a reactive system of commodity regulation, where the key substances had medical use and therefore required a global trading arranging to minimise the negative externalities from their production and use. It examines the key tenets of the global regulatory system and how they emerged in response to perceived key global issues and the emergence of new narcotic and psychotropic substances. It thereby seeks to determine the continued relevance of the global drug regulatory system to the issue of NPS and how it may evolve in response to the rapid proliferation of these substances. Ultimately, it concludes that the NPS phenomenon will merely accelerate shifts already underway within the system, towards a greater role for national regulatory decisions, an expansion of regulatory experimentation and options and a more general recourse to the principle of ‘policy pluralism’