Authors: Allyn L. Taylor and Ibadat S. Dhillon

The perceived success of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) in influencing national and global public health policies has led to growing interest in promulgating new international legal instruments to address global health issues—including calls for a Framework Convention on Alcohol Control (FCAC).The authors propose a gradual international legal strategy for alcohol control, starting with a non-binding code of practice focusing on areas of critical concern with wide political consensus, leading over time to a comprehensive binding treaty.

Author: Robin Room (Stockholm University, University of Melbourne and Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre)

Article by Professor Robin Room from the Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre (Australia) in response to the publication "An international legal strategy for alcohol control: not a framework convention—at least not yet" by authors Allyn L. Taylor and Ibadat S. Dhillon.

Authors: EMCDDA and EUROPOL

The EU drug markets report is the first comprehensive overview of illicit drug markets in the European Union. It covers issues such as production, consumer markets, trafficking, organised crime and policy responses, along with a review of the markets for heroin, cocaine, cannabis, amphetamine, methamphetamine, ecstasy and new psychoactive substances. It concludes with concrete action points for the areas where the current EU response to the drug market and its consequent harms may be improved.

An essential reference tool for law enforcement professionals, policymakers, the academic community and the general public, the report combines Europol’s strategic and operational understanding of trends and developments in organised crime with the EMCDDA’s ongoing monitoring and analysis of the drug phenomenon in Europe and beyond.

Author: Pekka Sulkunen (University of Helsinki)

In the introduction to the thematic issue Pekka Sulkunen argues for the relevance of integrating the social sciences into the addiction debate. He proposes the concept of 'geography' to overcome the difficulties in using 'national cultures' as a point of reference in comparative studies not only in the addiction field.

Full title: Consequences and behaviour problematised: The establishment of alcohol misuse as an object of empirical inquiry in late 18th- and early 19th-century European medicine

Author: Ruuska Arto (University of Helsinki)

In his article, Arto Ruuska discusses European medical thought on alcohol in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Earlier historiography has identified the era as the starting point of individualising disease concept of alcohol addiction. Ruuska argues that the era’s proper legacy is rather the establishment of alcohol-related phenomena as objects of empirical inquiry, and – contrary to the claims made in the historiography of the ‘disease concept of addiction’ – the articulation of socio-cultural embeddedness of alcohol-related pathologies.