Drug Law Reforms: Strategies and Obstacles

Drug Control: A Mega-Trilemma

The relation between law and society can attract attention for a lot of different reasons, one of them being the question of the effectiveness (and efficiency) of legislation. Legislation does not always fulfil the lawmakers' expectations. The reasons for that may vary. Circumstances may have changed, important variables may have been ignored, sloppy wording may have caused confusion or outright manipulation. Reality is often more complex than what the law and its makers can anticipate.

When a piece of legislation fails to take into account the particular structure and dynamics of the social system which it is supposed to influence, sociologists of law sometimes speak of an insufficient structural coupling between the two subsystems - i.e. the law and those parts of the material world that it wants to address. According to Günther Teubner, insufficient structural coupling will produce one of the following three dysfunctions: either indifference between the law and the social world (the law remains without effect), or destruction of the social object (instead of protecting that parts of society that the law wants to protect in their functioning, it has undesired counterproductive effects), or auto-destruction of the legal subsystem itself (destruction of the legal system's internal consistency and principles).