Author Archives: Toby Seddon

In early 2016, when I was drafting my chapter on drugs for the ‘Oxford Handbook of Criminology’, I made a passing reference to Dr John Marks’ heroin prescribing practice in the 1980s. I had assumed that somewhere there would be … Continue reading →

I have created a new page to bring together my previous and current work on drug law reform. Links to downloads where available.

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was interested to hear the Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, defending the new guidelines on weekly limits for safe drinking. She was particularly keen to stress their basis in science and evidence. … Continue reading →

As part of the general sprucing up of this website, I have added a page for ‘Papers’ which includes free-to-access articles and reports. I’ll continue to add to this. In the meantime, feel free to share and if there are … Continue reading →

To start the new year, I’ve revamped this blog and website, to include new pages covering my books, papers and projects. Work is ongoing to build up the content but do take a look round.

A recent report in The Guardian, on a ‘huge rise’ in illicit online sales of pharmaceuticals, reminded me of one of the best books I read in 2014: legal scholar Anupam Chander’s The Electronic Silk Road. Chander’s great insight, to … Continue reading →

On December 4th, I will be giving a public lecture in Manchester. The lecture’s premise is that we have reached a dead-end in our thinking about global illicit drug problems. The argument I will make is that the way out … Continue reading →

The publication of the Home Affairs Select Committee report on drug policy, followed by Nick Clegg’s intervention on the matter, raised a huge amount of interest in the field, prompting a flurry of media appearances, tweets, blogs and the like. … Continue reading →

A familiar trope in drug policy debates is the idea that policy-makers should pay closer attention to research and that there is a choice to be made between, on one side, ‘science’ and ‘evidence’, and on the other, ‘dogma’ and … Continue reading →

There is a widely-held view that drug policy in Britain (and elsewhere) is in the throes of a major transformation. Whereas for the last decade or longer, the policy obsession seemed to be with crime and criminal justice, over the … Continue reading →