Regulating New Psychoactive Substances in the Czech Republic: Policy Analysis under Urgency

Abstract

The criminal prohibition of psychoactive substances is challenged every day as new designer substances emerge on globalized markets in a regulatory void. In a case study of a recent regulatory amendment in the Czech Republic, the article reconstructs the formulation of recommendations by an advisory committee working at the boundary between science and practical policy making. A uniform legal status was applied to both high-risk and low-risk substances. The article demonstrates how expert efforts to produce evidence-based policy advice were constrained by an externally induced sense of urgency, avoidance of controversy, internal disunity about drug policy orientation, limited evidence, and the institutional momentum of traditional drug control. The logic of evidence was relativized by the tactical preference for consensus.

Keywords:

• new psychoactive substances
• urgency
• Czech Republic
• policy advice
• boundary work
• qualitative analysis
• case study
• cat-and-mouse phenomenon

Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to three anonymous reviewers and Professor Hal Colebatch for their useful comments and suggestions; Dr. Viktor Mravčík, Head of the National Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addictions, for facilitating access to the field; and Jan Dvořák of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague for help with interviewing and useful information on media coverage of NPS.

ORCID

Martin Nekola http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5317-1167

Notes

^1. NPS have also been referred to as new synthetic drugs, novel psychoactive drugs, emerging psychoactive substances, designer drugs or legal highs.

^2. At the time of data collection, the group consisted of 14 permanent members in total (excluding administrative staff). Usually, only about 8–10 permanent members are present at a meeting. Other experts participate on an ad hoc basis. For the interviews, all permanent members were invited and nine accepted (most of them belonging to the active part of the group in terms of their participation at the meetings). Duration of the interviews ranged from 30 to 60 minutes.

^3. The State Institute for Drug Control oversees the pharmaceutical industry.

^4. Presentation at a conference on “New Drugs: Prevention, Treatment, Regulation”, Prague, 6 December 2011.

^5. While some respondents suggested that law enforcement was strictly against legalization, others said that an alternative form of lawful regulation would have been acceptable to them.

^6. In contrast, our intention is not to identify and analyze all possible issues and perspectives which (as we might assume from collected data) were not considered by the group.

^7. R5 on ecstasy legalization: “It would certainly minimize the risk that people demand other things. It’s a kind of substitution”.

^8. Expressed explicitly by R4: “In my opinion, these debates are over. Even other members of the group have come to believe that [scheduling] is the only way of preventing these substances from being abused.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation [grant number P404/12/0725].