David Bewley-Taylor's International Drug Control: Consensus Fractured offers a carefully argued and insightful assessment of the repeated failures of the international effort to prevent the production, supply, and use of narcotic and psychotropic drugs for recreational purposes. Certainly, international drug control has often intersected with the United Nations. Sometimes particular parts of the organization have led the effort; at other times it has occurred under UN auspices, with UN sponsorship, or in UN diplomacy. And yet, within the vast drug-control literature relatively little attention has been paid to the roles played by the United Nations. Beginning to fill this gap is the book's most fundamental contribution.

One key feature of UN involvement in international drug control is its role in promulgating and enforcing leading treaties in this field, from the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs to the 1988 Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. The UN drug conventions, while not self-executing, bind the signatory states to work toward establishing policies prohibiting the manufacture, trade, and consumption of a range of illicit drugs. The extent to which solemn legal commitments are effective in shaping international behavior is an age-old controversy. The author's analysis sheds light on how ineffective legal commitments have been in controlling illegal drugs.

Bewley-Taylor labels the UN approach a global drug prohibition regime (GDPR): a “restrictive regime whereby the production, sale and even possession of cannabis, cocaine and most opiates, hallucinogens, barbiturates, amphetamines and tranquillizers outside strictly controlled medical scientific channels are punished with criminal sanctions in virtually every [UN member] nation” (p. 4). The author portrays this prohibitionist framework as emerging in response to US pressure on other UN member states to discourage drug consumption by working to make drugs expensive and inaccessible and to levy substantial penalties on those trafficking, possessing, or consuming them. It was hoped this would deter drug growers, traffickers, dealers, and consumers.

The author argues that for years UN member states adhered to the GDPR, even while the overall effectiveness of the regime's capacity to accomplish its core objectives was disappointing. By 2009 one UN report stated frankly that the GDPR had failed to reduce the global drug problem, noting that the “global number of users of cocaine and heroine expanded over the [1998–2007] period.” Likewise, Julia Braxton's 2006 study concluded that international society had made “no progress” in curbing global drug use: “More people were using drugs in the 2000s than at any other point in the history of drug control.”

While the main current in international drug control policies has been the UN prohibitionist regime, a notable counter-current has gained strength. With drug trafficking and consumption increasing, a number of countries—primarily European—have adopted domestic policies that are more tolerant, markedly less punitive, and more focused on harm reduction. This approach, now spearheaded by the European Union, interprets the challenges of drugs—criminal, health, social, and political—more broadly, offering up policy responses such as: drug-consumption rooms, opioid substitution therapy, needle and syringe programs, and access to controlled heroin prescriptions. Although more governments have concluded that “the benefits of an experimentalist approach to the conventions outweighed the potential costs of deviating from the regime's normative expectation” (p. 29), the author, relying on the Martha Finnemore-Kathryn Sikkink model of norm dynamics, contends that the number of deviating states has not reached a tipping point at which a new norm has emerged.

Ultimately, Bewley-Taylor strongly prefers the European-led approach to the more punitive UN policies promoted by the United States and vigorously supported by states ranging from Japan to Sweden. He argues that the American approach is a product of ideology, while the European is a product of pragmatism. He proceeds to associate this American “ideology” with the country's enduring moralistic, and in particular Puritanical, heritage.

Since labeling something ideological injects a somewhat pejorative connotation, the careful reader will want to closely scrutinize Bewley-Taylor's evidence here. For instance, is he conflating ideology and culture? Culture—a set of enduring values, attitudes, and beliefs that tends to be the product of a society's specific historical experiences—plays a critical role in shaping how citizens and their governments view such issues as crime and punishment, norms and expectations related to behavior, and levels of tolerance for deviation from social norms. Ideology might most accurately be associated with the proper function of government and its authority vis-a-vis citizens. So, is the contrast Bewley-Taylor pinpoints ideological, cultural, or some mixture of the two? That the Japanese are less tolerant of deviation and more inclined to shame or punish offenders might be seen as a matter of Japanese culture. Similarly, that many in Western Europe are more inclined to tolerate deviation, less willing to view drug consumption as crime, and more open to interpreting drug use as primarily a health issue might be an inherently cultural phenomenon. Certainly, the relation between culture and ideology vis-à-vis drug-control policies is ripe for future research.

Further, the American approach to controlling drugs could be characterized as more of a principled approach than an ideological one. Although Bewley-Taylor cites various works of Inis L. Claude Jr., he fails to draw on Claude's 1993 Review of International Studies article “The Tension Between Principle and Pragmatism in International Relations.” One might argue that Americans have long been inclined in the field of drug-control policies to promote a strict adherence to principle in promoting public anti-drug support at home and abroad. Americans tend to associate principled behavior with moral, virtuous, predictable, and orderly behavior in international affairs. In contrast to principled behavior, pragmatism greatly values flexibility and is less concerned with morality. In international relations, pragmatists improvise readily, are more accepting of deviation, and avoid strict norms and fixed principles. Thus, the author may be correct that the European approach to drug control has featured a strong element of pragmatism, while mistaking American ideology for what is in fact American principled behavior.

Further, a more frank admission that the European pragmatic approach has failed to curb dramatically the consumption of illegal drugs is in order. The inconvenient fact that ought to have been met head-on is that drug use across Europe has expanded in the last two decades at a faster pace than in the US. More generally, the author presents questionable evidence to support the claim that more tolerant and flexible approaches toward drug control function are better. Bewley-Taylor does cite a number of studies—and yet, the outcomes of some of these, such as UN internal assessments, have been mixed, and this book fails to analyze their conclusions or even examine their methodologies. Instead, the author simply provides his own general assessments: This study showed that “there do appear to be health and social gains,” or “there is good evidence that … ” or “a robust evidence base … now exists for the effectiveness of … ” (pp. 42–43, 94). Thus, the skeptical reader will find few persuasive details or quantitative evidence to support the author's pivotal conclusion that the alternative European approach has succeeded in minimizing the problems of illegal drug consumption better than the UN regime has. For these reasons, David Bewley-Taylor's work on international drug control might fairly be characterized as a path-breaking work, but one that raises as many questions as it answers.