A University of Maryland professor will head to Stockholm in June to accept an international prize for his research on drug enforcement and health.
Peter Reuter, a professor in the public policy school and criminology and criminal justice department, won the Stockholm Prize in Criminology, an international prize recognizing “outstanding achievements in criminological research or for the application of research results by practitioners for the reduction of crime and the advancement of human rights,” according to Stockholm University’s website.
Reuter is the first professor from this university to win the award since its establishment in 2006. He won the award alongside former Swiss President Ruth Dreifuss, who supported research on heroin-assisted treatment during her career in government.
Launched in 1992 as a five-year national trial in Switzerland, the treatment prescribes pharmacological heroin to people with opioid addictions who haven’t seen improvement through other treatment methods. The heroin, administered under medical supervision, is pure and industrially produced, so it isn’t laced with other dangerous chemicals.
“She did something unusual for a politician, which was standing up for a controversial science project because a policy decision would be informed by that project,” Reuter said of Dreifuss, who is now the chairperson of the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
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Analyzing the results of the Swiss study, Reuter found that this type of treatment can decrease the likelihood of opiate abuse.
Reuter researched the impact of aggressive versus lax enforcement of drug laws. He found that light enforcement shares many of the benefits of prohibition — such as decreased availability of drugs and drug-related deaths — whereas tough enforcement can cause increases in crime without reducing drug consumption.
“Light enforcement has some substantial good consequences, but in this country it’s rarely lightly enforced — it’s often heavily enforced,” Reuter said. “That doesn’t give you much advantage.”
Most of Reuter’s research has been conducted outside the U.S., which he said is because of Americans’ strong stigma against heroin. The Drug Enforcement Administration classifies it as a Schedule 1 drug, which marks it as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
Reuter attributes the stigma to the heroin epidemic of the 1960s and 1970s, which he said marked America’s first major drug problem. But he argues that that problem was caused by factors like the uncertain purity of heroin, other dangerous adulterants that were added to it and the sharing of needles — not the drug itself.
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Reuter’s work has been used to provide policy advice to governments and police in Brazil, Peru, Malaysia, New Zealand, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Vietnam, Uruguay and the United States, among others.
“It’s nice for me to get recognition, but I also am also pleased that drug research — which is a small field — has resurfaced,” Reuter said.
Reuter is also helping to create the the Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center at this university. In August, the public policy school received a $500,000 grant from the Maryland Governor’s Office of Crime Control & Prevention for the center’s development.
The university is to run the center “as a state entity to help utilize data and information and research to reduce violent crime in the State of Maryland,” said V. Glenn Fueston, GOCCP’s executive director.
Fueston selected Reuter to advise the center in September, before he won the award.
“His depth of knowledge is just incredible,” Fueston said. “[He’s] someone who has the depth and understanding of research, but also someone who could apply that research and create change.”
In June, Reuter will travel to Stockholm to accept the award in a ceremony held in conjunction with the Stockholm Criminology Symposium, an international conference for drug researchers and policymakers to discuss the latest in the research of crime policy.
“I think it’s really awesome we’re going to have a professor who has been awarded for his work in crime public policy,” junior government and politics and public policy major Maria Janush said. “I might be more interested in taking those types of classes in the future as I fill out my public policy electives.”
