title: Explaining drug policy: Towards an historical sociology of policy change.
abstract: The goal of seeking to understand the development over time of drug policies is a specific version of the more general intellectual project of finding ways of explaining social change. The latter has been a preoccupation of some of the greatest thinkers within the social sciences of the last 200 years, from Foucault all the way back to the three nineteenth-century pioneers, Marx, Durkheim and Weber. I describe this body of work as 'historical sociology'. In this paper, I outline how a particular approach to historical sociology can be fruitfully drawn upon to understand the development of drug policy, using by way of illustration the example of the analysis of a recent transformation in British drug policy: the rise of the criminal justice agenda. I conclude by arguing that by looking at developments in drug policy in this way, some new insights are opened up.
authors: Regulation, Security and Justice Research Centre, School of Law, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. toby.seddon@manchester.ac.uk
authors: Toby
authors: T
authors: Seddon
mesh_terms: D003415:Crime / Q000266:history* / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000517:prevention & control; D003466:Cultural Characteristics / Q000266:history; D004335:Drug and Narcotic Control / Q000266:history* / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D033161:Government Regulation / Q000266:history*; D006291:Health Policy / Q000266:history* / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D049671:History, 18th Century; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D012922:Social Change / Q000266:history*; D012961:Sociology / Q000266:history*; D019966:Substance-Related Disorders / Q000266:history* / Q000517:prevention & control / Q000534:rehabilitation; D006113:United Kingdom