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International Regimes and Drug Control in the 1990s

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Abstract

The 1980s saw the wider availability and growing consumption of illicit drugs. It also saw the emergence of an international consensus against drug trafficking by the international community. The increase in drug trafficking has occurred despite increasing international action through the main international control body, the United Nations, and other international institutions, to prevent it. This work has shown that there are many difficulties involved in attempts by legal structures to control an illegal activity, especially one which is as multi-faceted and multi-dimensional as the drug phenomenon. Suppression of one source of supply, one method of transportation and one pattern of abuse has often simply led to the emergence of other forms. This work has attempted to set the ‘drug problem’, as it has become known, into a theoretical framework which aids our understanding of the phenomenon, by further developing theories of regime creation. Because the drug phenomenon is complex and multi-faceted, it requires precisely the issue-specific approach of international regimes as understood by this research.

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Notes

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© 1998 Mandy Bentham

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Bentham, M. (1998). International Regimes and Drug Control in the 1990s. In: The Politics of Drug Control. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376595_7

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