Book Review: Dealing with Drugs in Europe: An Investigation of European Drug Control Experiences: France, the Netherlands and Sweden

• DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299327
• Author: Bruce Bullington
• Date: 01 March 2007
• Published date: 01 March 2007
• Subject Matter: Articles

criminal forensic psychology in the United Kingdom. Scholars from North America will be interested

in many of the chapters as well. This book will allow them to learn more about the increasingly

important Anglo-European research on forensic psychology and incorporate it into the previously

North American–dominated field. Students in specialist undergraduate and graduate courses will

find this book to be an informative introduction to the central concepts and debates in forensic psy-

chology. The book also will be useful to legal practitioners, including lawyers and policy makers,

and to scholars of forensic psychology.

Kamala London

University of Toledo, Ohio

Daniel B. Wright

University of Sussex, UK

Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2005). Dealing with Drugs in Europe: An Investigation of European

Drug Control Experiences: France, the Netherlands and Sweden. The Hague, Netherlands:

BJu Legal.

DOI: 10.1177/1057567707299327

Those interested in drug policy issues and especially in alternatives to the prohibition-based

directives that have dominated U.S. policy for nearly 100 years have recently had the opportunity to

learn about several innovative measures that have been popularized in Europe as well as in Canada,

Australia, and Latin America. Typically, these new approaches have been rather arbitrarily classified

under the rubric of harm reduction, although there has been no consistent, agreed-on definition of

exactly what that term means. Regardless of what one calls it, however, many nations and even

smaller locales (i.e., cities, counties, and regions) have begun to stretch the boundaries of traditional

drug-policy thinking to include a variety of measures that were previously ignored entirely or rele-

gated to a distinctly subservient role in the hegemonic model that features repression and prohibi-

tion as principal measures.

In essence, harm reductionists have pushed the envelope of orthodox drug thinking by choosing

to emphasize methods and policies featuring strategies designed to minimize the harms that

drugs can do to users themselves, to their families and friends, and to whole communities. These

typically assume the form of health-related measures such as needle and syringe provision and

exchange, injection rooms, maintenance and substitution programs for addicts, and widely distrib-

uted and frank educational materials geared toward making active users aware of some of the dan-

gers associated with unsterile practices. For nonusers, harm reduction often focuses on prevention

approaches, although there is an explicit recognition of the inevitability of some illicit use and of

the harms that can and do follow from the adoption and enforcement of what harm reductionists

see as overly strict prohibition strategies. Ultimately, harm reduction rests on the bedrock convic-

tion that a drug-free society is not attainable and therefore cannot serve as a pragmatic guide to

public policy. Under this model, public health concerns serve as replacements for the law enforce-

ment emphasis that guides us under prohibition.

Dealing With Drugs in Europe provides an insider’s view of some of the most important harm

reduction changes that have recently taken place in Europe and documents the resistance to those

changes. Boekhout van Solinge is a young researcher and scholar who has quickly established him-

self as a leading figure in drug research circles, even though he has only been pursuing this topic for

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