Video 5: The impact of law enforcement on public health and public safety

Loading...

来自 University of Geneva 的课程

Drugs, drug use, drug policy and health

1 个评分

University of Geneva

Drugs, drug use, drug policy and health

1 个评分

This MOOC is the first of its kind, since it addresses critical issues related to drugs from a multidisciplinary, health and human rights-based approach. Throughout the course you will cover a range of questions including what are drugs and why they controlled? What are the benefits and harms of taking drugs? How public health policies can address drug use? You will also learn about the intricacies of the international drug control framework and the negative consequences of widespread prohibitionist drug policies around the world. Finally, you will examine ways of furthering drug policy reform. The topics will be presented by over 40 speakers from scientific, academic and institutional backgrounds, spokespersons of civil society as well as people who use drugs presenting their views. By the end of the course you will have: - a strong understanding of the major health issues related to drug use and drug policy; - a clear vision of why drug policy is debated today; - and, if you so wish, you will be equipped to engage in the drug policy reform movement at your local or regional level.

从本节课中

Module 4: Questioning prohibition-based policies

Welcome to Module 4 which looks at questioning prohibition-based policies. In this Module, you will discover that most drug policies in the world are based on prohibition law enforcement and criminalization of drug use ; and see that such policies have a number of negative consequences on people’s health as well as on their human rights. This Module will also look at law enforcement more closely and reveal how it can cooperate to improve health. You will learn about the human rights framework and the drug control framework and see what human rights violations, stemming from the implementation of prohibitionist drug policies, look like around the world. Finally, you will also see that drug policies are connected to development and the environment, most often not in a good way, with prohibition fueling violence, crime and corruption and impeding development. By the end of this Module you will be able to: • Evaluate the extent to which prohibition-based policies have succeeded or failed in reducing drug production, trafficking and consumption; • Describe the negative impacts of prohibition-based policies on health, human rights and development; • Recall how prohibition-based policies fuel organized crime and trafficking. We hope this week will provide you with valuable insight into the reality of prohibitionist drug policies, for people in communities all over the world ; and help you see what have been the consequences of these policies, in terms of their impact on human rights, health and development. We also hope you enjoy the essential reading and optional additional resources we have prepared for you. Best wishes,The Drugs, Drug Use, Drug Policy and Health team

Introduction to Module 43:08

Video 2: Most drug policies in the world are based on prohibition law enforcement and criminalization of drug use9:59

Video 3: Are prohibition law enforcement drug policies effective?7:03

Video 4: The negative impact on health of prohibition law enforcement drug policies5:25

Video 5: The impact of law enforcement on public health and public safety6:03

Video 6: How law enforcement and health can cooperate to improve health8:11

与讲师见面

Michel Kazatchkine
Senior Fellow
Global Health Center, Graduate Institute for International Affairs and Development, Geneva
Barbara Broers
Professor (in Addiction Medicine)
Community Health Departement, Geneva University Hospitals
Aymeric Reyre
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Medicine, Paris 13 University
Jennifer Hasselgard-Rowe
Researcher and Lecturer
Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva

This video looks at the impact of policing of recent drug markets,

and drug consumption of public health and public safety.

In an ideal world,

law enforcement can be imagined as a kind of a silver bullet for society's drug problems.

This is because drug enforcement is

assumed to simultaneously protect public health by deterring

consumption and public safely by

pushing retail markets and drug consumption away from public spaces,

as well as fighting organized crime by

making a drug markets unattractive for criminal business.

However, in the real world,

research has so far not been able to confirm these positive effects of drug enforcement.

Quite to the contrary,

this research suggests that there are important trade-off between policing consumers,

retail markets and drug supply.

For example, research from Australia show the crackdown

on open markets to discourage drug users from consuming drugs,

nor retail sellers from selling them.

Rather police actions against

open drug markets seem to in the first place displays rather than to

solve open drug retail markets lead to

riskier consumption behavior especially in injecting drug users,

lead to behavior in retail traffickers that

can have a negative consequences on their health,

and make access to harm reduction services more difficult,

and disrupt the application of safer use rules.

Research from Switzerland suggests that, at least statistically,

there is a positive causal relationship between the intensity of

street-level drug law enforcement and the mortality of drug users.

This is a high price society has to pay for a potential increasing public safety.

Especially if one considers that research so far has not

shown the drug law enforcement does actually have an impact on local drug markets.

Even large interventions such as large seizures don't seem to

have a real effect on drug markets on prices, or purity.

Also enforcement has no effect on drug market violence,

and in some cases might even intensified.

It remains unclear if drug law enforcement

has any impact on the local level at least in the longer term.

Needle Park in Zurich,

one of the largest open drug scene that existed in Western Europe,

is a good example for what can happen if open drug markets are being policed heavily.

When the police crackdown on the Needle Parked in

an attempt to restore public order the city,

drug users did not simply vanish.

They just moved to an abandoned train station close

by where harm reduction services had less access.

Drug use became riskier for the users,

but this did not stop them from using.

The results were more overdoses and HIV infections,

more public consumption, and more petty crime in

the residential areas surrounding the old train station.

Instead of making the city more secure,

the crackdown on the Needle Park has worsened and might

even have prolonged the heroin crisis in Zurich.

Despite this problematic consequences,

it's very likely that drug law enforcement will remain

an important part of most drug policies around the world in the future.

We should therefore ask ourselves how policing can be better integrated

in health-based drug policies than just calling for abandoning them.

The question is therefore not how policing is helping to solve societies drug problem,

but how the police can actually contribute to dealing with drug consumption,

retail markets, and political expectations

towards public safety in a socially acceptable way.

Drug consumption rules or safe injection facilities

in Switzerland are a good example for illustrating this problem.

Their establishment creates important tensions between the police and

to social workers or agencies who are running these consumption rules.

As it's obvious a drug user frequenting consumption rooms,

are carrying drugs, are consuming them and

that there's stealing going on into consumption rooms.

This is a fact that many police officers find hard to accept.

Nevertheless, over the years police and the agencies

running drug consumption rooms have developed routines

which regulate what police can do around and

under certain circumstances also in consumption rooms.

These routines are necessary to run the facility smoothly.

Guiding these routines is the common interest of

police and public health to protect the health of

drug users as good as possible introduce public consumption to minimum at the same time.

In order to do so,

drug consumption rooms must be able to operate especially in cities.

Too much police interference puts smooth operations at risk.

However, none puts the acceptance of

the consumption room in the neighborhoods also at risks.

So, both sides have to find a way how to deal with each others' and how to deal with

the consumption room that somehow doesn't really

fit into the log must be operated sustainably.

Finding this equilibrium between

these two requirements is key for consumption rooms to work.

It is by cooperation that policing contributes to drug policies health outcomes

探索我们的目录

免费加入并获得个性化推荐、更新和优惠。

Coursera 致力于普及全世界最好的教育，它与全球一流大学和机构合作提供在线课程。

© 2018 Coursera Inc. 保留所有权利。

通过 App Store 下载

通过 Google Play 获取