Long Essay Topics

Choose ONE topic among the following:

1. ‘Narcotics prohibition has always been driven by racism.’ Discuss.

2. What successes has the post-Nixonian war on drugs scored?

3. How useful has the concept of addiction been to drug prohibition?

4. Drug maintenance: miracle solution or abject surrender?

5. Account for the rise and partial fall of marijuana prohibition either (i) internationally or
(ii) in one country.

6. Should cocaine be taxed rather than banned?

7. What place does demand reduction have in addressing drug abuse?

8. Compare patterns of drug use in any two non-European countries and any one century.

9. Are international treaties a good way to handle drug control?

10. What, if anything, does the American opioid epidemic tell us about a theoretical
legalization of heroin?

11. Should LSD and the other hallucinogens be legalised for medical use and how?

Essays will be due by 5pm, Thursday 8 December.

 Formatting Guidelines

Essays should have a maximum length of 5,000 words including footnotes but not including
any (optional) bibliography. Submissions should be made in Word and 1 ½ line spaced.

All quotations must be presented in between single quotation marks (‘thus’), with sub-quotes
within quotations double marked (“thus”). The source must be footnoted, with footnotes
introduced by an Arabic numeral.1

Footnote format for books:

Author Name, Book Title (City of Publication: Publisher, year), page number(s).

Footnote format for articles:

Author Name, ‘Article title’, Publication, volume (year), page number(s).

Footnote format for press articles:

Author Name, ‘Article title’, Newspaper title, date, page number(s) or web address.

Examples:

David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987), pp. 24-7.

Virginia Berridge, ‘War conditions and narcotics control: the passing of Defence of the
Realm Act Regulation 40B’, Journal of Social Policy, 7 (1978), p. 299.

Olga Khazan, ‘Why can’t addicts just quit?’, The Atlantic, 13 November 2017,
www.theatlantic.com.

When a book or article is quoted for the second time, footnote only the author surname, short
title, and page reference if there is one.

Examples:

Musto, The American Disease, p. 13.

Berridge, ‘War conditions and narcotics control’, pp. 297-8.

Khazan, ‘Why can’t addicts just quit?’.

If the second reference comes immediately after the first, you can simply write: Ibid.,
followed by the page number. If one footnote includes several references, these should be
separated by semi-colons.

1
Reference.