Product Description: This handbook provides a comprehensive examination of the past and present roles of drugs in society with a focus on theory, research, policy, and practice. Includes 28 original chapters with multi-disciplinary and international perspectives by top social and behavioral scientists Reviews current knowledge in the field, including key research findings, theoretical developments, and methodological debates Identifies ongoing controversies in the field, emergent topics, and areas in need of further inquiry Discusses individual drugs as well as topics like physiological theories of drug use and abuse, public health implications of drugs, patterns of drugs and crime, international drug trade and trafficking, and designer drugs...read more

Product Description: This book focuses on the use of drugs in our lives and how we respond to them. Whereas drug policy typically centres on the problems of illicit drugs or licit drugs used in illicit ways or circumstances, Contemporary Drug Policy instead considers the wide variety of substances we call drugs as a normal part of our personal and social experience and asks how and when drugs benefit us as well as how and when they are harmful...read more

Product Description: This text adds a "human face" to social problems by looking at them from the perspective of the individual, and the problems we face in everyday life as members of society. This book is designed to provoke discussion and critical thinking by focusing on everyday issues that virtually all readers can relate to: forming friendly or intimate relationships; moving through the educational system; leaving home; finding a job and career, growing old; living with serious illness and death; etc...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: This book tells the story of a crime wave and the response to it by government policy makers, law enforcement officials, and the news media. The author relates how public officials and the news media used modest shifts in the official rate of violent crime during the 1980s to construct a crisis of crime and violence...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)