Book review: Tough Choices: Risk, Security and the Criminalization of Drug Policy
| Author | Simon Flacks |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895812468663 |
| Published date | 01 February 2013 |
| Date | 01 February 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 127
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Toby Seddon, Lisa Williams and Robert Ralphs,
Tough Choices: Risk, Security and the Criminalization of Drug Policy. Oxford University
Press: Oxford, 2012; 240 pp.: 9780199697236, £60.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Simon Flacks, University of Reading, UK
A political preoccupation with the links between drugs and offending behaviour has, in
recent years, been matched by increasing academic scrutiny of the drugs–crime nexus.
This latest work is an exploration of the logic underpinning the ‘Tough Choices’ agenda,
launched by New Labour in 2005, and embraced by the current coalition government.
Through various criminal justice interventions including testing on arrest and required
treatment/assessment, the aim of this policy rubric has been to cut crime by addressing
the use of heroin and crack cocaine.
In many ways, the book can be read as a sequel to Toby Seddon’s (2010) A History of
Drugs where he charts the development of the ‘drug problem’ according to changes in
the ways social issues are imagined and addressed. One of this book’s key, and indeed
persuasive, arguments is that the much maligned and supposed shift towards the govern-
ance of drug policy through the criminal justice system (the ‘criminal justice turn’),
rather than by way of public health strategies, has been overstated. The authors argue
that, contrary to the claims of other researchers in the drugs and crime field, public health
measures such as ‘harm reduction’ programming and criminal justice responses to the
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