Drug Control, Human Rights, and the Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health: A Reply to Saul Takahashi

Abstract:

A recent article in this journal [Human Rights Quarterly] challenged claims that a human rights framework should be applied to drug control. This article questions the author's assertions and reframes them in the context of socio-legal drug scholarship, aiming to build on the discourse concerning human rights and drug use. It is submitted that a rights-based approach is a necessary, indeed obligatory, ethical and legal framework through which to address drug use and that international human rights law provides the proper scope for determining where interferences with individual human rights might be justified on certain, limited grounds.

Citation

Flacks, Simon Drug Control, 'Human Rights, and the Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health: A Reply to Saul Takahashi' (2011) 33 Human Rights Quarterly, 856.

Download the article from Human Rights Quarterly

Simon Flacks is Lecturer at the University of Reading. He holds a PhD from the University in Vienna and LL.M. in International Human Rights Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, and formerly worked for the Child Rights Information Network (CRIN) in London.

He is a research associate with the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy