AshehougAgency

The Good Enemy

This book is about the war on drugs and the drug policy that is practised in Scandinavia and in many parts of the world. When the book was first published in 1984, the authors wrote in the preface: This book has arisen from a profound concern about the dominant perception of drugs in the Scandinavian countries, and about the drug policy this perception leads to.". The book is a systematic criticism of the official drug policy in the Nordic countries. The authors take a liberal stand to narcotic substances, and present a variety of proposals with the aim to defuse our view on drugs and the ones using them.

In the revised edition, Nils Christie shows how the situation has moved from bad to worse since the book first appeared: More people use illegal drugs, more people are hurt, more people die, more people are arrested and more people imprisoned. "The war on drugs continues. What we then described and warned against, becomes more and more evident. It has become easier to see that we are on the wrong track. And even more important to say so", Christie writes.

Translations: Danish (Akademisk forlag, Copenhagen), Finnish (Weilin + Göös, Helsinki), German (AJZ Verlag, Bielefeld), Russian (Aletheia, St. Petersburg in collaboration with Moscow Center for Prison Reform), Swedish (Rabén & Sjögren, Stockholm)

First published: 1984, Universitetsforlaget.
3rd revised edition: 2003, Universitetsforlaget

Nils Christie: Biography and bibliography