Guides: How to reference a Religious text in Geopolitics style

Guide: How to cite a Religious text in Geopolitics style

Cite A Religious text in Geopolitics style

Use the following template to cite a religious text using the Geopolitics citation style. For help with other source types, like books, PDFs, or websites, check out our other guides. To have your reference list or bibliography automatically made for you, try our free citation generator.

Key:
Pink text = information that you will need to find from the source.
Black text = text required by the Geopolitics style.

In-text citation

Place this part right after the quote or reference to the source in your assignment.

Template

 Title (City: Publisher, Year Published).

Example

What to do about US demand?

Although all agree that demand from the US is a chief cause of the troubles in Mexico and Central America, there are differences in how to address this.

Jonathan Caulkins is not only sceptical of the political feasibility of legalisation of illegal drugs, for example, but also argues that this position should be sustained (Caulkins and Lee 2012). Caulkins is convinced that prohibition drives prices up far above legal levels; that the taxes necessary to prevent a price collapse, if drugs were legalised, are uncollectable. Moreover, he is not alone in seeing legalisation as an “irreversible game” in that some drug use induced by legalisation would remain even if that policy change were later undone.

Other authors argue that political support for the status quo remains strong. For example, Keith Humphreys, a former senior advisor at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in the Obama administration, places at zero the probability of seeing a radical change in the policy towards cocaine any time soon, the drug whose US market provides at least half of the Mexican drug gangs’ total revenue. Part of the reason for this is that present policies, for all their flaws, have coincided with a relative stabilisation in the overall levels of use in the US (see also Kleiman 2012 and Donohue 2012).

Yet despite this, Peter Reuter (2012) shows that there is very little evidence to suggest that enforcement raises prices or reduces availability. Between 1980 and 2005, the number of people imprisoned for drug offences in local jails and state and federal prisons increased by a factor of 10, yet during this period of increased policing, the price of heroin and cocaine fell around 70%.

Jeffrey Miron, meanwhile, reiterates the classical economic case for a laissez faire approach. It stems from the uncontested fact that prohibition does not eliminate drug markets, but simply drives them underground and the money into the hands of criminals (Miron 2012). Miron proposes legalisation with a sin tax on drugs sufficiently stiff to yield a price as high as under prohibition. While not endorsing outright legalisation, other authors nevertheless do provide sensible arguments for moving away from the status quo.

Without endorsing outright legalisation, other authors nevertheless do provide arguments for moving away from the status quo in a direction that would address the consequences of black markets. After reporting that 56.6% of the estimated cost of illegal drug use in the US (estimated for 2002 as $217 billion in 2008 dollars) was due to crime-related costs and only 8.7% was caused by health costs, Stanford Law Professor John Donohue admits serious concerns about the balance of overall US drug policy. He insists on the fundamental question of how it can be possible to have falling prices of illegal drugs in the face of intense enforcement efforts – carrying an annual cost of more than $40 billion. Interestingly, he invokes an earlier study by Caulkins and others that found that an additional $1 million spent on treatment and demand reduction reduced net cocaine consumption by 103.6 kg while the same amount of money spent on longer sentences reduced consumption by just 12.6 kg.

What to do about Mexican supply?

On the other side of the market is the supply from Mexico. Mark Kleiman criticises the US government’s long-standing demand that Mexico act to reduce the flow of drugs across the border so that US drug consumption will be reduced. He claims that even if Mexico were successful in crippling that traffic, the effects on drug abuse in the US would be modest at best because shipments of drugs would simply be shifted to other routes.

Moreover, somewhat surprisingly, some of those who are sceptical of the possibility or even the convenience of any significant drug-policy changes in the US argue that Mexico should change its strategies and policies to align them more with its own interests and less with those of its northern neighbour. Both Kleiman and Caulkins suggest that the objective of minimising violence should have a higher priority in the Mexican strategy – a suggestion that no doubt would make more than one law enforcer raise an eyebrow.

A change is needed

Despite their differences, the arguments and evidence presented in the eBook point very strongly in the direction of a serious reconsideration of drug policy. The economic and human costs paid both in the US as well as in the countries where the drugs come from, cast doubt over the validity of such policies. Our US colleagues who tell us that any significant change in the strategy is unlikely to happen in the US essentially for political reasons may be right. But it doesn’t mean that those concerned about this problem, for good reason, should give up. On the contrary, the resistance to change should encourage more and better research and a bigger effort to foster a rational discussion of the drug problem. Our eBook aims to contribute towards these ends. E. Zedillo, 'Rethinking The ‘War On Drugs’: Insights From The US And Mexico | VOX, CEPR’S Policy Portal', Voxeu.Org, 2012, http://www.voxeu.org/article/rethinking-war-drugs-insights-us-and-mexico.

Guide: How to cite a Religious text in Geopolitics style

Guide: How to cite a Religious text in Geopolitics style

Cite A Religious text in Geopolitics style

Key:

In-text citation

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