Book review: Human Rights and Drug Control: The False Dichotomy
| Published date | 01 April 2018 |
| Author | Douglas Husak |
| Date | 01 April 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895817719798 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 247
is that such offending is relatively rare and the pathway to such an extreme offence so
unique to each individual that a theoretical model will not work in this context. This
would appear to match some of the difficulties others have had in this area of research
and may well contain an element of truth.
Working in the field of offender rehabilitation I anticipate that this volume will have
limited use for practitioners working in the community with offenders post-release. It
may give guidance on how to formulate a case, particularly historic cases with limited
information about events leading up to commission of sexual homicide. Or it may help
workers to identify those clients who are at risk of perpetrating sexually motivated mur-
der in the future and enable practitioners to develop plans to avoid this scenario.
This research would certainly appear to be of much greater utility to those investigat-
ing sexual homicides or those whose job it is to develop initial treatment plans in custo-
dial settings. More than that this book appears to be an invaluable resource for those
carrying out future research in the field of understanding sexual homicide.
Reference
Chan HCO, Heide KM and Beauregard E (2011) What propels sexual murderers: A proposed
integrated theory of social learning and routine activities theories. International Journal of
Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 55(2): 228–250.
Saul Takahashi, Human Rights and Drug Control: The False Dichotomy, Bloomsbury Publishing:
London, 2016; 199 pp.: 9781849467063, £55.00
Reviewed by: Douglas Husak, Rutgers University, USA
DOI: 10.1177/1748895817719798
Many of us live in an echo chamber where we only read books by authors with whom we
already agree. The great majority of recent publications challenge the justifiability of our
regime of drug prohibitions, although not always on the basis Takahashi examines: their
alleged conflict with human rights. Just as often, I think, critics of the status quo despair
that our international drug control system is unworkable and simply cannot realistically
be tweaked to meet its primary objective of substantially reducing the consumption of
illicit substances. The latter critics are seemingly prepared to support the goal of pro-
scribing drugs, if only they could somehow be persuaded that government efforts to do
so would be reasonably successful. The adversaries Takahashi is eager to confront do not
believe that the regime of prohibitions is defensible in the first place, regardless of
whether it can be made to work. Takahashi vehemently disagrees with this position; he
insists that no fundamental incompatibility exists between our regime of drug control
and our respect for human rights. Thus his book is a useful exception to the scholarly
norm and should be studied by all those commentators who might smugly believe that no
reasonable mind can doubt that our system of international drug control is fatally flawed
and inconsistent with our veneration of human rights.
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