Towards Drug Policy Justice: Harm Reduction, Human Rights and Changing Drug Policy Contexts

Taking the shifting global drug policy terrain as a starting point, this collection moves beyond debates about whether to reform drug policies to a focus on delivering ‘drug policy justice’ – repairing the damage caused by the war on drugs as a component of reform efforts and safeguarding against future harms in legal markets.

This book brings together some of the leading international thinkers and advocates on harm reduction and drug policy to introduce key questions in contemporary drug policy. Across five themes, and with contributions from different regions and disciplines, it explores ethical, legal, empirical and historical perspectives on delivering ‘drug policy justice’ from supply through to use. Essays cover a wide range of issues, from the effects of COVID on drug policy to securing economic and environmental justice, and from human rights in Asian drug policy to questions of race and equity in cannabis reforms, providing diverse insights on both prominent and overlooked drug policy challenges.

Towards Drug Policy Justice is a benchmark text for scholars, students, advocates and policymakers as the book explores new models of global drug policy reform.

Damon Barrett is a senior lecturer in human rights at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He is Co-Director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, based at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex. His work has focused on what it means to adopt a human rights-based approach to drugs, with a particular focus on the rights of the child.

Rick Lines is Professor of Criminology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Swansea University in Wales, where he is Co-Director of Global Drug Policy Observatory. He has been called ‘a key figure in the emerging field of human rights and drug policy’ and is Chair of the International Centre of Human Rights and Drug Policy at the University of Essex and author of Drug Control and Human Rights in International Law. In 2022, he joined Public Health Wales where he leads national policy, programming and research on drug use and harm reduction.