Video | Julia Buxton explains ‘Drug Control and Development: A Blind Spot’

Julia Buxton, Professor at the University of Manchester, UK and Senior Research Associate at the Global Drug Policy Observatory, Swansea University, UK, talks about her article ‘Drug Control and Development: A Blind Spot’ published in the 12^th thematic issue of the International Development Policy journal.

Development questions have been central to international drug policy since the first tentative steps towards a global control regime over a century ago. The strategy that was devised to limit the cultivation of mind- and mood-altering plants imposed a disproportionate cost on cultivating territories in the global South. This burden intensified in the post-war period and as the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and United States ‘war on drugs’ in the 1970s institutionalised ‘narcotics’ as a security issue and a law enforcement concern. Despite criminalisation and coercive state eradication efforts, illicit narcotic plant cultivation (opium poppy, coca) has persisted, reaching record highs after 2015. This chapter provides an overview of the incentives for cultivation created by the prohibition paradigm. It incorporates a broad historical sweep to highlight the salience of development questions over the longue durée of international drug control and to demonstrate how a system so antithetical to the interests of global South countries has been institutionalised

Read the article (open access): https://doi.org/10.4000/poldev.3667

Reference of the article:
Julia Buxton (2020) ‘Drug Control and Development: A Blind Spot’ in J. Buxton, M. Chinery-Hesse and K. Tinasti (Eds), Drug Policies and Development: Conflict and Coexistence, International Development Policy, 12 | 2020 (Geneva and Leiden: The Graduate Institute, Brill | Nijhoff), https://doi.org/10.4000/poldev.3667