Caterina Gouvis Roman, Heather Ahn-Redding and Rita J. Simon, Illicit Drug Policies, Trafficking, and Use the World Over.

Caterina Gouvis Roman, Heather Ahn-Redding and Rita J. Simon, Illicit Drug Policies, Trafficking, and Use the World Over. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, $75.00 hardcover.

Historically, scholarship examining cross-national drug policy has been limited to the countries of North America and Western Europe. Recently, comparative drug policy has expanded to include less studied parts of the world, such as South America, Russia, and the Middle East. This expansion has allowed researchers to begin the process of synthesizing drug policy information as well as understanding the diverse social, cultural, and political responses to illicit drug use from around the world. Unfortunately, barriers to reliable research such as incomplete and poorly collected data have hampered efforts to effectively compare cross-national drug policies.

In this book, Roman, Ahn-Redding, and Simon present a compendium of comparative drug policy information from twenty-four countries around the world. The countries represented are quite diverse, ranging from the typical United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands to less well documented locations such as Nigeria, Costa Rica, and Israel. Each chapter is organized with a brief description of each country's demographic, criminal justice, drug use, law enforcement, and existing drug policy information. In this work, the authors focus primarily on cannabis, cocaine, and heroin; and the information on "trafficking" is limited to intra-country low-level drug sales between individuals rather than international drug sales related to illicit criminal organizations.

Illicit Drug Policies, Trafficking and Use the World Over is a book that leaves the reader wanting more. While the work is rich in its breadth, it is fairly modest in its detail; most chapters are less than eight pages in length. It would be easy to criticize the authors for a lack of depth if they did not explicitly state that the intent of this book is simply to encourage readers to pursue further examination of their own cross-national drug policy interests. To this extent, the authors are successful. The information in this text is interesting and informative. However, if readers are interested in comparative drug policy analysis or an interpretation of cross-national drug policy, they will be disappointed. The text offers virtually no direct comparison of drug policy information between countries but merely presents descriptive information related to each country's drug policy experience. The authors leave it up to the reader to make comparisons. Another concern for readers is the quality of data from some of the countries studied. While the authors are forthright in recognizing the dubious nature of some of the information presented, these admissions do not necessarily compensate for questionable results. Consequently, some of the information provided must be regarded with a degree of caution.

Sean R Hogan, University of California, Berkeley