When cannabis-based medicine was withdrawn in the UK in 1973 it appeared cannabis' career as a medicine had ended, but even as cannabis became regulated solely as an illicit drug, it appeared it was being re-medicalized. This thesis, framed as a history of science and policy-making, studied cannabis' re-medicalization from 1973 and in so doing analysed the process whereby boundaries shift between illicit 'drug' and licit 'medicine' and the issues and interests involved. It argues that changing scientific knowledge, from the synthesis of THC to the discovery of the endocannabinoid system, spurred by individual scientists, developing scientific disciplines, and advances in technology all contributed to a shifting environment around cannabis and opened-up new avenues for cannabis as a medicine. Initially, interest and funding were directed to the cannabis field through political and social fears over cannabis' recreational. Driven by drug control imperatives expert committees, in particular, the working groups of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs provided an early arena for discussion and stimulated research on cannabis which led ultimately to increased research on medical applications. The study reveals that although international and domestic drug control systems acted as countervailing forces, they provided spurs to re-medicalization as pressure mounted to isolate calls for medical cannabis from legalization arguments. In transforming the concept of cannabis, the drug, into cannabis, the medicine, the pharmaceutical industry was fundamental, through the provision of synthetic cannabinoids and finally plant extracts with the development of GW Pharmaceuticals and their product Sativex. The incentive to study cannabis as a medicine would not have emerged, as it did, without user activism and the thesis argues that in the UK it was pressure from Multiple Sclerosis sufferers that encouraged research and its direction. Once legitimacy was conferred by influential professional bodies, such as the BMA, and the House of Lords there was a concerted effort to place cannabis into the clinical trial system and through regulatory processes. Re-medicalization could exist within the drug control system and discourse shifted towards the drug control framework and the relative positions of both licit and illicit drugs.

The complexity of international drug trafficking is not only derived from its inherent nature as a transnational illicit enterprise, but also from the themes and perceptions used to characterize, understand and explain it. The knot of perceptions and themes that comprise the drug trade are well evidenced in the discipline of International Relations and in the international policymaking arena. The following work primarily examines how both International Relations and the international policymaking arena treat the drug issue and also includes discussions involving other illicit activities. This research seeks to answer the following question: How have drugs predominantly been presented in both IR and in the arena of international policy making. In order to address this, several subquestions will be explored: 1) What themes have been associated with drugs in International Relations literature. 2) How are drugs viewed in the international arena. 3) What is the historical background to contemporary perceptions of the drug issue. 4) What are alternative themes and approaches to understanding and explaining drugs. 5) What are the consequences from the answers to the preceding questions for IR and for the world of illicit drugs?

This thesis examines the ways in which the field of counternarcotics has transformed the police in Colombia. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concept of 'field' , this thesis explores the field of counternarcotics as a prime example of contemporary security configurations, in which the policing of a security issue is characterised by the dispersion of authority and resources among a multitude of actors from different realms, who are continually redrawing the boundaries between them. This research adopted an ethnographic approach based on a six-month fieldwork period within the Countemarcotics Police Directorate, which provide the focal point of analysis vis-avis the other security actors operating within this field, particularly the armed forces, and to a lesser extent, (foreign) private contractors. The ethnographic data was supplemented by semi-structured interviews and primary documentary sources. This thesis argues that the police and the other security actors accumulate different forms of 'capital' (economic, social, military) and deploy them through a series of counternarcotics activities to attain symbolic capital and enhance or maintain their position of power and authority within the field of counternarcotics. Moreover, based on Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus', this thesis explores the extent to which this field has endowed the counternarcotics police with particular attributes, such as their elitism and militarism. This counternarcotics police habitus, in tum, has become dominant within the entire organisation, to the detriment of other police groups. By exploring the transformation experienced by police forces in contemporary security arrangements, this thesis contributes to policing and police studies, particularly to the extant scholarship on police culture and the militarisation of police forces.

The last 25 years of UK’s drug policy has been criticised as focusing on risk management, harm-reduction techniques and contributing to the criminalisation of the drug users whose treatment needs were not adequately addressed. Likewise,until recently research in criminal justice settings has been concentrating on evaluating treatment outcomes, often disregarding individual experiences and processes. Drug policy in the UK has recently undergone a historical shift, striving towards more person-centred practices that focus on recovery and ‘putting people first’. Along with the shift in the drug policy, there is a demand for research that individualises recovery processes and journeys and draws attention to examining personal and contextual factors that influence change. This thesis is part of the interest in individual experiences of addiction and recovery and focuses on delineating the process from one stage to the other. It is divided into two parts: the first part explores the process of change in a group of active users and users in recovery through the examination of their life stories. The second part explores the accounts of change in a group of substance using offenders in prison. Temporality is used as a methodological approach to examine change thoroughly across and at different points in time in order to understand drug using and recovery trajectories. The findings of the current study reveal change as a nonlinear process full of discontinuities, manifested in patterns of interchangeable states of relapse and abstinence or treatment attempts. The transition from addiction to recovery is achieved through the users’ participation in treatment groups that encourage the reconstruction of addict narratives to recovering ones. Analysis of the data collected in the prison confirmed the importance of relational factors in the adoption of new, healthier narratives. Moreover, it highlighted the significance of cultivating a climate of acceptance and support as an essential component of the therapeutic work conducted in prisons. The thesis serves as a critical body of work that links a multidisciplinary body of literature. The findings of the thesis contribute both to the academic knowledge in the fields of forensic psychology, addiction and criminology and provide essential knowledge to practitioners working with substance users both in the community and in the prison.

This thesis explores the dynamics of conflict by focusing on two aspects of the problem – (a), links between illicit drugs and conflict and (b), the mechanism and extent to which illicit drug production and trade weaken the state. The research question I have set out for this project is: “what is the impact of illicit drugs on conflict and how does access to drugs affect the strength and ideology of insurgent groups and hampers state-building?” Although Afghanistan is the main case study, in order to understand the phenomenon in a wider context, the study also explores the relationship between drugs economy and conflict through examples of insurgencies in other parts of the world – mainly the FARC in Colombia, PKK in Turkey and LTTE in Sri Lanka. In addition, the thesis offers a unique empirical contribution. Based on first-hand knowledge from the field, this study is unusual in many ways as it critically analyses the impact of illicit drugs on conflict and governance and explores how the patron-client relations in the drug trade create and cement structural corruption. In order to produce a uniquely detailed picture of the conflict in Afghanistan and the overall impact of drugs, this study draws on an extensive field work and more than a hundred original interviews with several actors including insurgents, drug traders/smugglers, poppy farmers, local elders and politicians, government officials as well as experts. It explores, arguably, for the first time, the detailed mechanism and extent to which drug production and trafficking inhibit state-building and facilitate insurgency in Afghanistan. The study argues that the conflict in Afghanistan didn’t start because of drugs; it was the war that created a suitable environment for drug production which now plays a significant role in perpetuating and prolonging the violence. The study examines the Taliban’s evolving involvement in the drugs economy and discusses the insurgent group’s multiple sources of income. It also provides a comprehensive picture of the Taliban’s governance and organisational structure. This research offers a multidisciplinary framework drawing together data from a number of areas of knowledge and sources and examines the nexus between drugs, insurgency and state-building by offering detailed and fresh information on the current state of overlapping fields such as International Relations, Political Economy, Political Anthropology and Development and State-Building. While focusing on the decades-long war in Afghanistan, the thesis attempts to provide an integrated and comprehensive framework for understanding the conflict in general. While discussing the conflicts’ causes and motivations, the existing literature is mostly focused on a few factors including greed, grievance, ethnic and social deprivation. Although these are all valuable and important contributions, the thesis argues that the conflict itself is a complex phenomenon and its understanding and analysis needs a comprehensive approach. Therefore, the thesis also examines other overlooked and overlapping factors including the role of foreign actors, nationalism, criminality and ideology in initiating and perpetuating the conflict. This study fills a conceptual lacuna in the field of conflict studies and devotes considerable attention to the problems of drugs and conflicts, the challenges of state-building and the complexities of insurgency by bringing together various dimensions and factors into one whole. The thesis argues that in an increasingly perplexing and globalising world, conflicts are becoming more complicated involving a variety of actors at local, regional and international levels as well as a combination of a wide range of causes and motivations. While discussing the motivations and causes of conflicts including civil wars, this study suggests the “Hybrid Framework” of conflict to understand the nature of intra-state conflicts. The “Hybrid Framework” takes into account a variety of overlapping causes and motivations as well as the complex web of actors at different levels.

This thesis presents the design, optimisation and testing of a novel in-field system for illicit drug identification and its implementation to a fast-parcel environment using Energy Dispersive X-ray Diffraction and multivariate analysis. A major threat in security in recent years has been the transportation of illicit drugs into the United Kingdom through a variety of routes, and most predominantly via the postal system. X-ray diffraction’s low false alarm rate and reduced need for manual inspections had been found to improve screening effectiveness and detection performance, making it a viable alternative for border control applications. A system was primarily designed to determine the optimal configuration of secondary collimators. Two out of six possible scattering cell designs, ‘V’ and ‘VV’, provided the highest counts per minute whilst keeping the peak resolution acceptable, and it was decided that both should be accommodated in the DILAX built. The prototype DILAX system was then manufactured and its mechanical components characterised and subsequently optimised. The inherent filtration present in the DILAX source resulted in significantly more beam-hardening compared to the design. Furthermore, the prototype featured an extrapolation from a single diffraction beam, used in the design, to an array of twenty diffraction beams and equivalent collimator-detector systems, which led to cross-contamination due to multiple scatter recorded. However, the potential of the system was determined by evaluating its diffraction capabilities and associated prediction power under a fast-parcel setting using various material libraries. The diffraction profiles of drugs and typical cutting agents were recorded to cover as many illicit substances and adulterants as possible for a conclusive system, and the possibility of combining diffraction information with transmission images to improve performance has been demonstrated. Multivariate analysis was performed on a library of seventy-five simulated parcels, with the DILAX system scoring relatively high sensitivity and specificity at 83.02% and 77.27% respectively with a total accuracy of 81.33%.

Policy analysis has not been a part of mainstream Sri Lankan research or academic tradition, and hence there exists a lack of research on policy studies in Sri Lanka. Given also a paucity of research on illicit drug use and contemporary drug policy, this research study generated and analysed a body of evidence about the response to drug misuse and its related policies in Sri Lanka between 1984 and 2008. As the subject of drug policy can be viewed through a variety of perspectives, this thesis adopted a multi-disciplinary approach. It drew on ideas, theories, concepts and research from a variety of social science disciplines such as sociology, political science, international relations, public administration and social policy and included an historical approach to understanding policy development. The study provides an informed narrative describing the rationale for the development of Sri Lanka’s drug policies, their course and outcome and the roles of the various actors, institutions, organisations and interest groups already established, or which came into existence to respond to drug misuse. This shows how, and why, particular policies are shaped and influenced by the actors, institutions and organisations, and by particular discourses. The conceptual foundations for this study were epistemic community theory, stakeholder analysis and policy transfer theory; and the thesis will seek to explain policy in changing contexts. Semi-structured key informant interviews and documentary analysis were the main research methods employed. The analysis revealed that external influences, stakeholder dynamics, consensus in policy approaches, and moral frameworks have combined to sustain a criminal justice model to the management of drug problems and to ward off attempts to introduce a system with a stronger focus on treatment and public health. This study demonstrates that the interests of stakeholders and their relative power significantly influenced the legitimisation of consensual knowledge diffused by epistemic communities which underpinned policy outcomes.

This thesis examines the relationship between processes of state consolidation and the illicit opium/heroin economy in Shan State since 1988. Over the past twenty-five years, the government of Myanmar (Burma) has established greater authority over large parts of Shan State, neutralizing much of the threat posed by armed groups and strengthening its hold over revenue extraction. During this period Myanmar has retained its position as the world's second largest producer of illicit opium/heroin, the majority of which is produced in Shan State. This thesis seeks to answer the overarching research question: What role has the opium/heroin economy played in fortifying and/or fragmenting processes of state consolidation in Shan State, Myanmar, in the period since 1988? In addressing this question, my study tests the hypothesis that rather than necessarily being a cause of disorder and state breakdown, illegal drug economies can play an important role in processes of state consolidation. In order to test this hypothesis I break down my overarching research question into four sub-questions: First, why have the Shan borderlands with China and Thailand become central to the government's statebuilding aspirations? Second, what strategies has the government deployed in order to extend its power and authority in borderland regions? Third, how have these strategies been imposed, resisted and brokered within the Shan borderlands? Fourth, what is the relationship between contested processes of state consolidation and the drug economy in Shan State in the period since 1988? In addressing these questions I argue that it is increasingly anachronistic to view the drug economy narrowly as part of the insurgent war economy. Alongside the continued role it plays in financing armed opposition to the government, the drug trade has also become deeply embedded within processes of illiberal state consolidation and capitalist development. Through an analysis of the specific spatial dynamics of power relations, material interests and institutional arrangements, this study renders visible the messy and fragmented multiplicity of motivations and actors (including insurgents, ceasefire groups, the military, government-sanctioned militias, national and transnational investors, and local populations) which have shaped changing configurations of power across Shan State. In doing so, it provides new ways to account for the uneven political topography of the Myanmar state, the repertoires of violence enacted across Shan State and the different kinds of 'institutions of extraction' that have emerged around borderland resources.

Since the early 1990s, maritime routes have been considered to be the main method used by Colombian smugglers to transport illicit drugs to consumer or transhipment countries. Smugglers purchase off the shelf solutions to transport illicit drugs, such as go-fast boats and communication equipment, but also invest in developing their own artefacts, such as makeshift submersible and semisubmersible artefacts, narcosubmarines. The Colombian Navy has adopted several strategies and adapted several technologies in their attempt to control the flows of illicit drugs. In this research I present an overview of the ‘co-evolution’ of drug trafficking technologies and the techniques and technologies used by the Colombian Navy to counter the activities of drug smugglers, emphasizing the process of self-building artefacts by smugglers and local responses by the Navy personnel. The diversity of smugglers artefacts are analysed as a result of local knowledge and dispersed peer-innovation. Novel uses of old technologies and practices of interdiction arise as the result of different forms of learning, among them a local form of knowledge ‘malicia indigena’ (local cunning). The procurement and use of interdiction boats and operational strategies by the Navy are shaped by interaction of two arenas: the arena of practice - the knowledge and experience of local commanders and their perceptions of interdiction events; and, the arena of command, which focuses on producing tangible results in order to reassert the Navy as a capable counterdrug agency. This thesis offers insights from Science and Technology Studies to the understanding of the ‘War on Drugs, and in particular the Biography of Artefacts and Practices, perspective that combines historical and to ethnographic methods to engage different moments and locales. Special attention was given to the uneven access to information between different settings and the consequences of this asymmetry both for the research and also for the actors involved in the process. The empirical findings and theoretical insights contribute to understanding drug smuggling and military organisations and Enforcement Agencies in ways that can inform public policies regarding illicit drug control.

This research explores the understudied phenomenon of performance and image enhancing drug (PIED) markets by examining the structure and formation of the market for PIEDs in the Netherlands and Belgium. Furthermore, this study aims to understand and analyse the actors that operate in the PIED dealing environment. In particular bodybuilding is adopted as a case study. Finally, this thesis examines how the PIED control system and its application influence these respective markets. Chapter one introduces the global PIED problem, the policy options currently available to deal with it, and its connection to anti-doping and sport. Chapter two begins by reviewing the literature on PIED use and its supply, and reflects on the anti-doping and PIED policies that seek to regulate this market. In chapter three the theoretical contours of this dissertation are developed. Chapter four describes the research methods which form the empirical bases of the findings chapters. Chapter five focuses on the general characteristics of PIED suppliers, and the ways in which the actions of PIED dealers are influenced by the market cultures in which they operate. Chapter six examines the importance of socio-cultural factors in the formation and development of PIED dealing networks within bodybuilding subcultures. Chapter seven analyses and describes the characteristics of the Belgian and Dutch PIED markets, and unravels the complex relationship between the two. Chapter eight explores the illegal production of steroids in the Netherlands and the flourishing Internet trade in Belgium. Chapter nine assesses the harms related to the production and distribution of PIEDs, and accounts for the effects that Belgian and Dutch PIED policies may have on this illicit market. Finally, in chapter ten, the main findings of this dissertation are summarized, future research endeavours are considered and policy implications are drawn from the analysis. This thesis illustrates that social systems of rules and values, and in particular the embeddedness of culture, are important factors in our efforts to comprehend illicit PIED markets. Specifically, ‘the beliefs, norms, ‘tools’, rules and behaviours appropriate to a cultural setting are key factors for understanding the structure of PIED markets and greater attention must be given to the role played by socio-cultural factors in influencing the market behaviour of criminal groups and individuals. Nevertheless, this thesis also demonstrates that it is imperative to examine the production, distribution and use of PIEDs, as embedded within a diverse combination of social, economic and cultural processes. Indeed, the structure and formation of illicit PIED markets are shaped by a variety of factors including the types of PIEDs dealt within them, the characteristics of the users, the social structures which sustain them, the cultural and economic context in which the markets exist, and market forces (e.g. technical innovations, drug policies).