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Podcast: Transforming Society podcast
Episode: Drugs: The path that led to prohibition
Description: The goal of drug policy is clear, according to the United Nations, whose convention on narcotic drugs largely sets the framework for what individual states do. The aim, the UN says, is to end the ‘serious evil’ of addiction. This, it adds, is to be achieved by preventing public access to dangerous substances, while at the same time ensuring adequate provision of narcotics to meet medical and scientific need.  The challenge of these twin purposes – ensuring availability for medical use, preventing availability for recreational use –encapsulates the ‘dual use dilemma’ that has confronted drug policymakers for the past 150 years...