Setting priorities for HIV/AIDS interventions

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Michael Massing

In America's twenty-five-year war against drugs, only one national policy achieved some success. That was the Nixon Administration's program for treating heroin addicts, which was dismantled by the Reagan Administration. In The Fix, Michael Massing exposes the political and ideological narrow-mindedness that have made national drug policy a failure, and demonstrates convincingly why we should reinstate the policy that worked. Massing shows that drug treatment works by describing the success that street workers have had in reaching out to addicts in Spanish Harlem and placing them in the few treatment programs now available. Further evidence that treatment can reduce the demand for drugs comes from the Nixon years. Confronted with a raging heroin epidemic in the early 1970s, President Nixon responded by allocating hundreds of millions of dollars to set up a nationwide network of methadone clinics and other drug-treatment facilities. The program was a striking success, and, if revived today, it could go a long way toward reducing the rate of drug-related crime in the United States.

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Paul Cairney, Donley T. Studlar, Hadii M. Mamudu

Smoking is the number one preventable cause of death and disease in the world. This has been known for some time but the responses of governments to this problem have varied enormously. Many countries which now have comprehensive tobacco control regimes did very little to regulate tobacco until the 1980s. Further, many countries still have very limited tobacco controls. The book raises two key questions: Why is there often such a wide gap between the size of the policy problem and the government response? And why, if the problem is the same across the globe, does policy vary so markedly across political systems? This is the first major book by political scientists explaining global tobacco control policy. It identifies a history of minimal tobacco control, linked to the power of the tobacco industry, then charts the extent to which governments, aided by public health advocates, have regulated tobacco domestically and internationally in the modern era.

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Richard Layard and Stephen Glaister

"... Covers all the main problems that arise in a typical cost-benefit exercise. Part I covers the main theoretical issues, including shadow pricing, discount rates, and problems of risk, uncertainty, and income distribution. Part II considers the problem of how to ascribe a monetary value to things like safety and physical risk, time, and environmental damages. The third part covers six separate case studies. Actual examples drawn, amongst others, from transport pricing, the allocation of health care, and water vending in developing countries are described."--Back cover.

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Alan I. Marcus and Hamilton Cravens

"How can we have received so many benefits while still being as worried as ever about our health and the health care system established to ensure and extend those benefits? The historical perspective provided by the essays in this volume helps answer this question by identifying two points of significant change in health care policy. Beginning in the 1950s there emerged a subtle yet critical reconceptualization as the individual rather than the group came to figure prominently as the central policy-making unit. Then in the late 1960s, a palpable sense of limits rendered the individualism of the previous decade into a Malthusian formulation: the greater the access or benefits that any one person received, the less access and fewer benefits others could get. Besides tracing these patterns in health care development, the essays also show how traditional notions of expertise have been affected by the changes."--BOOK JACKET.