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Marijuana legalization is a controversial and multifaceted issue that is now the subject of serious debate. In May 2014, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a bill requiring the Secretary of Administration to produce a report about various consequences of legalizing marijuana. This resulting report provides a foundation for thinking about the various consequences of different policy options while being explicit about the uncertainties involved.
This book provides the first multidisciplinary and nonpartisan analysis of how the United States should decide on the legal status of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It draws on data about the experiences of Western European nations with less punitive drug policies as well as new analyses of America's experience with legal cocaine and heroin a century ago, and of America's efforts to regulate gambling, prostitution, alcohol and cigarettes. It offers projections on the likely consequences of a number of different legalization regimes and shows that the choice about how to regulate drugs involves complicated tradeoffs among goals and conflict among social groups. The book presents a sophisticated discussion of how society should deal with the uncertainty about the consequences of legal change. Finally, it explains, in terms of individual attitudes toward risk, why it is so difficult to accomplish substantial reform of drug policy in America.
Winner of the 9984 Leslie T. Wilkins Award for the best book in criminology and criminal justice. Bookmaking, numbers, and loansharking are reputed to be major sources of revenue for organized crime, controlled by the "visible hand" of violence. For years this belief has formed the basis of government policy toward illegal markets. Drawing on police files, confiscated records, and interviews with police, prosecutors, and criminal informants, Reuter systematically refutes the notion that the Mafia, by using political connections and the threat of violence, controls the major illegal markets. Instead, he suggests that the cost of suppressing competition has ensured that these markets are populated with small enterprises, many of them marginal and ephemeral. Peter Reuter is a Senior Economist at the Rand Corporation. Disorganized Crime is included in The MIT Press Series on Organization Studies, edited by John Van Maanen.
Discussions about reducing the harms associated with drug use and antidrug policies are often politicized, infused with questionable data, and unproductive. This paper provides a nonpartisan primer on drug use and drug policy in the United States. It aims to bring those new to drug policy up to speed and provide ideas to researchers and potential research funders about how they could make strong contributions to the field.
Originally developed to reduce drug trafficking, efforts to combat money foundering have broadened over the years to address other crimes and, most recently, terrorism. In this study, the authors look at the scale and characteristics of money laundering, describe and assess the current anti-money laundering regime, and make proposals for its improvement. -- From back cover.
Over the next decade, the United States is likely to face a flood of debate and state referendums proposing the legalization of marijuana production and use. Marijuana Legalization will provide readers with a non-partisan primer about the topic, covering everything from the medical definition and benefits and negative consequences of using marijuana, to current laws around the drug, the likely consequences of legalization at the state and national levels, and ideas about the way that marijuana could be produced and regulated.
U.S. demand for illicit drugs creates markets for Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). This paper examines how marijuana legalization in California might influence DTO revenues and the violence in Mexico, focusing on gross revenues from export and distribution to wholesale markets near the southwestern U.S. border. The analysis described here is rooted in an earlier RAND Corporation study on marijuana legalization (Kilmer, Caulkins, Pacula, et al., 2010) and presents a method of estimating the revenues that international drug traffickers derive from U.S. sales that is transparent and, hence, auditable and replicable. We believe that this method can be iteratively improved by research over time, whereas existing methods that rely heavily on classified information have not been subject to review and have not shown much ongoing improvement. Five technical appendixes include additional information about the weight of a marijuana joint, THC content of sinsemilla and commercial-grade marijuana, marijuana prices, Mexican DTO revenues from drugs other than marijuana, and the availability of Mexican marijuana in the U.S.