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Psychopharmacological Pathway

Definition

Crime or violence produced by a drug's direct chemical effect on cognition, mood or impulse control while a person is intoxicated or withdrawing.

Related terms

Direction-of-Causation Problem
The methodological difficulty of establishing whether drug use causes offending, offending causes drug use, or a shared upstream factor produces both.
Drug Court
A specialist court that diverts substance-dependent offenders from prosecution into supervised treatment, with the judge playing an active monitoring role. Participants who...
Economic-Compulsive Pathway
Crime committed to raise money for a dependent drug habit, such as theft or shoplifting, rather than crime caused by the drug's...
Systemic Pathway
Violence generated by the structure of an illegal drug market itself, including turf disputes, debt enforcement and robbery of dealers, in the...
Drugs-Crime Nexus
The umbrella term for the several distinct ways drug use and crime connect, rather than a single causal claim that drugs cause...
Tripartite Framework
Paul Goldstein's 1985 model dividing drug-related violence and crime into three separate causal pathways: psychopharmacological, economic-compulsive and systemic.

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