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As recreational cannabis becomes increasingly legalized in the United States, the media play a key role in shaping the public's imagination about the recreational cannabis industry and its users. Cannabis prohibition rhetoric, which once associated racial minorities with criminality and deviance, has been supplanted by modern cannabis legalization rhetoric, which associates recreational cannabis with White individualists and the virtues of the neoliberal marketplace. Through a textual analysis of the docuseries High Profits, this article identifies how color-blind racial ideology found in the series reflects the greater rhetoric around recreational cannabis in media that prioritizes catering to White comfort and promoting color-blind idealizations of the American Dream over calling on media consumers to consider and address the lasting racialized harms of cannabis prohibition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconstructs the story of a so far unknown manuscript, a handwritten, personal account detailing a 1927 journey to the United States and Canada with the primary purpose of selling Hungarian wine as part of a more extensive international venture. The article introduces the research that led to the identification of the writer of the manuscript - written on sheets of paper from a Canadian hotel - and outlines the background of a fascinating business project, thereby positioning the text not only as a unique example to be studied with the tools of microhistory but also placing it in the broader, transatlantic historical and political environment of the time. The text is also studied and presented as a piece of travel writing that provides unique insights into Hungarian perceptions of North America in the 1920s and the Hungarian images of Canada and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social politics of women's alcohol use is controversial given current debates over maternal-fetal health, fetal alcohol syndrome, and debates about welfare. Exploring the early twentieth century intersections of Prohibition, birth control reform, and alcohol politics reveals the historical roots of current recommendations surrounding women, alcohol, and public assistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A major impediment to any nation abandoning the policy of drug prohibition has been the fact that international drug treaties to which the majority of United Nations (UN) member states are signatory prohibit the non‐medical use of amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine and heroin. The future of these treaties is now uncertain because of decisions by Uruguay, eight US states and Canada to legalize cannabis use. This paper: (1) provides a brief account of the international drug control treaties; (2) outlines the major criticisms of the treaties; (3) analyses critically proposals for treaty reform; and (4) provides a personal view on policies that nation states could adopt to minimize the harms from the use of cannabis, party drugs and hallucinogens, opioids, stimulants and new psychoactive substances. It is argued that: a major risk of cannabis legalization in the United States is promotion of heavy use and increased harm by a weakly regulated industry; some cautious national experiments with the regulation of party drugs and hallucinogens would be informative; a strong case remains for prohibiting the nonmedical use of opioids while mitigating the adverse effects that this policy has on opioid‐dependent people; stimulant legalization will probably increase problem use but prohibition is difficult to enforce, highlighting the urgency of finding better ways to reduce demand for these drugs and respond to problem users; and that it is unclear what the best approach is to reducing possible harms that may arise from the use of new psychoactive substances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Aim: To examine briefly the (i) rationales for two policy proposals in the United States to make it mandatory for cigarettes to contain very low levels of nicotine and to legalize cannabis for recreational use by adults; and (ii) possible lessons that participants in each policy debate may learn from each other. Method: We briefly describe the diverging policies towards cannabis and tobacco in the United States, explain and critically analyse their rationales and discuss possible policy lessons. Results: Advocates of cannabis legalization have argued that prohibition has been an ineffective and expensive policy that penalizes ethnic minority users unjustly of a drug that is far less harmful than alcohol. The prohibition of traditional tobacco cigarettes has been advocated as a way to eliminate cigarette smoking. These proposals embody very different attitudes towards the harms of recreational adult drug use. Advocates of nicotine prohibition demand that alternative methods of nicotine delivery must be shown to be completely safe before adults are allowed to use them. Advocates of tobacco prohibition ignore evidence that smokers may not use these products and the likelihood of expanding the illicit tobacco market. Advocates of legalizing and regulating recreational cannabis ignore the need to tax and regulate sales in order to minimize the harms of heavy use. Conclusions: It is not clear that the prohibition of adult use has a useful role to play in the regulation of either cannabis or tobacco. If both products remain legal, the goals of regulating tobacco and cannabis products should be to restrict youth access, promote the use of the least harmful products, provide users with evidence‐based information on both absolute and differential product risks of use and use differential taxes and marketing controls to promote ways of using these products that cause the least harm to their users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public support for legalizing marijuana use increased from 25% in 1995 to 60% in 2016, rising in lockstep with support for same-sex marriage. Between November 2012 and November 2016, voters in eight states passed ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana sales for nonmedical purposes-covering one-fifth of the US population. These changes are unprecedented but are not independent of the changes in medical marijuana laws that have occurred over the past 20 years. This article suggests five ways in which the passage and implementation of medical marijuana laws smoothed the transition to nonmedical legalization in the United States: ( a) They demonstrated the efficacy of using voter initiatives to change marijuana supply laws, ( b) enabled the psychological changes needed to destabilize the 'war on drugs' policy stasis, ( c) generated an evidence base that could be used to downplay concerns about nonmedical legalization, ( d) created a visible and active marijuana industry, and ( e) revealed that the federal government would allow state and local jurisdictions to generate tax revenue from marijuana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of URVIO - Revista Latinoamericana de Seguridad Ciudadana is the property of FLACSO - Ecuador (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The touchstone event in the history of alcohol control policy-both in the United States and globally-has unquestionably been the American experiment with alcohol prohibition. Yet in our haste to dismiss this failed policy as the product of misguided temperance zealotry, we risk overlooking a vast historical literature of objective liquor-control studies that are surprisingly similar to more modern studies of policy effectiveness. This article explores this largely undiscovered liquor-control literature, and places it into the context of the long history of alcohol-control studies. The article concludes that not only is this early liquor-control literature an important part of the heritage of the policy-studies discipline, but also a potentially valuable resource for future historical and longitudinal studies into alcohol and alcohol-control issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U.S. America's aggressive drug enforcement policy, costing over US$1 trillion and putting millions of people in prison for casual drug use, is an abject failure. By regulating drug use rather than criminalizing it, per capita recreational drug use in the United States would be the same or even lower than it currently is, safer for consumers, and far less costly to society in terms of socioeconomic harm. This failed policy has not only affected U.S. society in such a harmful way that it almost cannot be overstated, but it has also resulted in quite needless drug cartel violence in Mexico and other countries. Included here is a pragmatic suggestion for reform of U.S. drug policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how racialized meanings were attributed to alcoholic products (tequila, pulque, and beer) in the United States and in Mexico in the early part of the 20th century. Researchers in both countries provide a wealth of information about the politics, establishment, and enforcement of alcohol prohibition. Yet, few projects consider the effects of these measures from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newspaper articles and primary and secondary sources from the United States and Mexico, this work illustrates how, amid changing ideas regarding alcohol regulation, various actors projected racial and class meanings onto commodities and their consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Relaciones Internacionales, Estrategia y Seguridad is the property of Revista de Relaciones Internacionales, Estrategia y Seguridad and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article highlights racialized constructions of criminality that surfaced in the wake of mass migrations and immigrations of African American and European workers to the industrial North during the first few decades of the 20th century. This attention to historical patterns is critical to contemporary studies because it shows processes and dynamics that are far less visible in today's criminal justice landscape, overwhelmingly dominated by black and brown faces. Too often, policy researchers deem rehabilitative, nonpunitive approaches to illegality among marginalized and impoverished populations fanciful and too abstract to be implemented. The evidence here suggests that earlier responses to similarly stigmatized white immigrant populations actually led to more humane reforms and shifts away from harsh laws and incapacitation as preeminent responses to social inequality. This earlier reformist moment happened in direct relation to increasingly repressive criminal justice responses to African Americans, which shows how blackness was reconfigured as a more durable criminal identity. Understanding this crucial period also helps to map the long road to mass incarceration. In today's popular postracial discourse about personal responsibility, the guiding logic presumes that the relative absence of white criminals is a product of good citizenship and not discriminatory policies prefiguring the New Deal welfare state. Parables of hard work and law-abidingness have erased this crucial period in the history of incarceration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim The aim of the current paper is to examine the impact of the enactment of constitutional prohibition in the United States in 1920 on total homicides, alcohol-related homicides and non-alcohol-related homicides in Chicago. Design Data are drawn from the Chicago Historical Homicide Project, a data set chronicling 11 018 homicides in Chicago between 1870 and 1930. Interrupted time–series and autoregression integrated moving average (ARIMA) models are employed to examine the impact of prohibition on three separate population-adjusted homicide series. All models control for potential confounding from World War I demobilization and from trend data drawn from Wesley Skogan's Time–Series Data from Chicago. Findings Total and non-alcohol-related homicide rates increased during prohibition by 21% and 11%, respectively, while alcohol-related homicides remained unchanged. For other covariates, alcohol-related homicides were related negatively to the size of the Chicago police force and positively to police expenditures and to the proportion of the Chicago population aged 21 years and younger. Non-alcohol-related homicides were related positively to police expenditures and negatively to the size of the Chicago police force. Conclusions While total and non-alcohol-related homicides in the United States continued to rise during prohibition, a finding consistent with other studies, the rate of alcohol-related homicides remained unchanged. The divergent impact of prohibition on alcohol- and non-alcohol-related homicides is discussed in relation to previous studies of homicide in this era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to add to the discussion about hemp prohibition in the United States by comparing the environmental performance of industrial hemp relative to its substitutes in a few key industrial applications. The life cycle environmental performance of industrial hemp products is of particular interest because environmental inefficiencies often impose costs on society as a whole, and additionally, the government has initiated a large number of programs intended both to reduce pollution and to increase production of bio-based industrial feedstocks. The positive attributes of industrial hemp are considered here in the context of counter-vailing attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to chronicle the effort of physicians to secure the fight to prescribe beer, liquor, and other alcoholic beverages to their patients for medicinal uses during the Prohibition era. A review of the medical literature and popular press from the period 1920-26 reveals that the physicians who lobbied for the right to prescribe alcohol and, ultimately, took their claim to the United States Supreme Court, were not uniformly antiprohibitionists attempting to circumvent the Eighteenth Amendment. Instead, this coalition of physician activists, led by John P. Davin and Samuel W. Lambert, included both supporters and opponents of prohibition. Their attitudes on the therapeutic value of beer and liquor also varied widely. Yet what united these men and women--and what defined their movement--was opposition to state interference with the practice of medicine and an increasing concern with the federal government's role in the regulation of their profession. The defeat of their efforts, presaging the passage of the Sheppard- Towner Act in 1921 and the extension of veterans' health benefits in 1924, marked an important step in the development of antagonism between the medical community and the federal government during the mid-twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical explanations for the American “noble experiment” with alcohol prohibition based on individual conspiracies, cultural changes, social movements, or self-interested bureaucracies are partial and unsatisfying. Recent advances in punctuated equilibrium theory shine new light on this historical enigma, providing a more persuasive account of the dramatic episodes associated with both constitutional prohibition and its repeal. Through longitudinal analysis of a unique data set reflective of early twentieth century public alcohol control sentiments, this article suggests that, as but one of a range of potential alcohol policy options, national alcohol prohibition was hardly a foregone conclusion. The ultimate adoption of prohibition over competing alcohol control alternatives, as well as its eventual repeal, can best be understood with reference to particular feedback processes inherent in the institutional structure of American policymaking, which readily account for both the mad dash for prohibition and the widespread clamor for repeal, which have traditionally eluded historical explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Americans have had a long and varied history with beverage alcohol. Literature and images from the Temperance and Prohibition Movements survive today, although organized collections are few. The authors present an overview of web sites, research centers and collections, and printed guides to historical resources on American alcohol use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the article by Peter Reuter and Harold Pollack on the relationship between drug prices and enforcement intensity. He mentions that the empirical evidence speaks just to the failures of the past practice of enforcement, and enforcement has not optimized in producing the maximal effect on prices. He states that law enforcement does not frequently think in terms of maximization of social welfare or efficient production with respect to prices or objective function.

The author discusses the legalization of commercial production and sale of cannabis in the first two states, namely, Colorado and Washington in the November's 2012 elections. The author mentions that the greatest change that has occurred following the passage of cannabis measures is the ability for individuals over the age of 21 to legally possess and grow cannabis products in those states. The author provides that the consequences of the legalization are yet unclear.

The author focuses on the performance of administrative drug-scheduling processes in dealing with drugs examined by C. Coulson and J. P. Caulkins. The author mentions that four possible Type II errors were discovered by the researchers and found that legislative action is responsible for one probable Type I error. He adds that the single class of benefit from the use of any drug recognized in the conventions and the Controlled Substances Act was noted by the researchers.

The article presentes the author's stand about the study of W. Hall on the National Alcohol Prohibition in the U.S. He highlights the history of prohibition that has started during the time of Sultan Murad IV in the seventeenth-century. Further,he also comments on the difference between the two words, prohibition and partial prohibition that has been a contentious issue in language that served as an advantageous frame for libertarians.

In this article the author discusses the aspects of cause and effects of alcohol use and its addiction in human beings. He discusses the common factors in the addiction of alcohol and other drugs. Also investigated are the use of alcohol as a commodity in the U.S. He states that the prohibition of drug raises the difference between criminalized addicts from non-criminalized addicts.

More than a decade in the making, America's opioid crisis has morphed from being driven by prescription drugs to one fuelled by heroin and, increasingly, fentanyl. Drawing on historical lessons of the era of National Alcohol Prohibition highlights the unintended, but predictable impact of supply-side interventions on the dynamics of illicit drug markets. Under the Iron Law of Prohibition, efforts to interrupt and suppress the illicit drug supply produce economic and logistical pressures favouring ever-more compact substitutes. This iatrogenic progression towards increasingly potent illicit drugs can be curtailed only through evidence-based harm reduction and demand reduction policies that acknowledge the structural determinants of health., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)