Axel Klein
VITA
Axel Klein is a Social Anthropologist by training. He got into the drugs field by accident some 20 years ago and has been grappling with some critical questions ever since.
His interests span across several dimensions – first the continuous fascination of people with mind-altering substances in their different shapes and guises and the cultures of consumption that arise; secondly, the efforts by governments to manage the risks inherent in the use of these substances and the control apparatus that has been built up over the past half century; thirdly, the dynamics of an underground market and the criminality that has emerged at local as well at international basis and the efforts to combat it. He has had the opportunity of working with diverse organisations including NGOs like ISDD, DrugScope and Hibsicus, but also international agencies like the European Commission, the EMCDDA and UNODC in various capacities. Having worked on projects in over 30 countries including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Jamaica and Nigeria he thinks that drug control is in crises and in urgent need of reform. He is currently lecturing at the University of Kent, is the editor of Drugs and Alcohol Today and have published inter alia Drugs and the World (2008), The Khat Nexus. Stimulating the Debate on Drugs (2007) and Caribbean Drugs: From Criminalisation to Harm Reduction(2004).
Global phenomenon, national policy – costs and benefits of the international drug control system
The export of drug control measures in the guise of international development cooperation is expanding the control system at the point when its adequacy is seriously called into question in the very countries that called it into being. Key drivers are bureaucracies and professional groups, who have conjured a binary moral scheme of protective and corrosive forces warring for control of the young. Their claims are challenged by increasingly assertive groups of drug users and suppliers whose discourse is based on a medical need that conventional medicine and the law deny them. This tension has opened a space for new policy models with revised definitions of ‘drug’, tailored to social, cultural and medical needs of national or local units.
