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From Mountains To Molehills: A Comparative Analysis Of Drug Policy, Brian A. Ford

Annual Survey of International & Comparative Law

This paper examines the debate surrounding the trend of global movements away from prohibition and towards a harms reduction approach to drug policy. This paper reviews the prohibitionist model that is, by and large, the global status quo of how countries deal with drugs. Under the prohibitionist approach, governments criminally ban the production, trafficking, sale, possession, and use of drugs in an effort to directly combat the harms associated with drugs. Section I of this paper presents the prohibitionist approach as the international status quo and examines the effects and failures of that approach. Section II examines a variety of …