Rethinking drug laws: Theory, history, politics. By TobySeddon, Oxford University Press, Oxford. 2023. £90.00. ISBN: 978‐0‐19‐284652‐5
本书利用毒品政策的全球历史与政治，重新构想监管理论，挑战传统毒品法律与政策的思考框架，对法学、政治学和社会学研究者有启发。
This magisterial book seems to be about drugs.It is.More importantly, however, it advances novel engagement with regulatory theory of general, indeed generative, import.Toby Seddon uses the global history and politics of drug policy as an international canvas for repainting the contours of regulatory theory.He arrives at no detailed proposal for a program of reform.His purpose is to change the way we think about drug law and policy.He accomplishes this with deft insight.The book is intellectually serious, evocative, and challenging.It steps boldly outside the usual parameters of policy discourse.Seddon does not believe the fundamental debate is about whether criminal law should be turned on or off for the control of markets in particular psychoactive substances.Such framings are facile from the Seddon standpoint.The book ponders regulatory futures that transcend older frames like the regulatory state.In a way, Seddon decentres the West, while extending a British tradition of regulatory theory in Colin Scott's elaboration of Leigh Hancher and Michael Moran's concept of regulatory space, of regulatory capacity as fragmented and dispersed.Seddon unearths regulation by digging deeper below surfaces occupied by state institutions.The regulatory space construct in the hands of Scott leads to a conception of regulation as pluralistic, nonhierarchical, public and private, state and non-state, agentic, derived from interaction, negotiation, and bargaining, but also structural.So how should we think about mutually constitutive agency and structure?Seddon admires Clifford Shearing's framing of "exchangespace."Space and time are not separate, but a spacetime continuum.Exchangespace pays theoretical homage to Einstein's "spacetime."It also grows from Giddens' structuration.Understanding comes from a constitutive turn.Regulation constitutes markets, that recursively constitute regulation.Seddon plays with the idea that regulation and markets are part of the same thing.What if prohibition, legalization, and decriminalization were all just different ways of regulating drug markets?A constitutive relationship between regulation and markets means understanding them not as separate realms but rather as "two sides of the same coin."Spacetime analysis of drug regulation has an origin story.Colonialism and racism problematize drug use as a given thing of policy analysis.A race arc reaches across origins.Race implants a deep seam running through the foundations of drug control across globalizing regulatory movements that take off to a new orbit in the nineteenth century.Built into the structure of early drug laws was "a set of political choices about which substances were to be defined as 'drugs'"-cannabis/opium/cocaine but not alcohol/tobacco, choices that embodied white Western cultural preferences.David Levi-Faur and Jacint Jordana's insights on regulatory capitalism are advanced through the thought that the British Empire's Opium Wars forced China to accept Indian opium.This was a constitutive moment in the history of the capitalist trading system.The Opium Wars subordinated China in ugly embrace through a trade that China interprets as its "century of humiliation."Marxists might marginalize markets in opium for the masses as epiphenomenal.Hardly.Opium was China's single largest import by value before and during the Opium Wars and for 40 years thereafter.