ABSTRACT
After a century of prohibition and 50 years of the ‘war on drugs’, the last decade has seen an increasing number of stakeholders calling for a different response to the drug ‘problem’. The effectiveness and mainstreaming of harm reduction and the failure of the criminal justice approach and the call for scientific evidence and human rights-informed policies have led many to frame the world drug problem as a health issue, rather than a law enforcement issue. Many stakeholders across a wide range of sectors now believe that people who are ‘addicted’ need treatment, not punishment. In this chapter, I suggest that criminalisation and pathologisation are not a dichotomy. Rather, they are two sides of the same coin. There is a danger that while prisoners are labelled as patients, patients could soon become de facto prisoners. I argue that seeing all people dependent on drugs as sick, diseased or otherwise in need of medical intervention and treatment to restore them to a non-addicted state is an insidious form of prohibition that will continue to exploit and control people and holds a range of harms that, even if unintended, are easily foreseen.
