Measuring drug policy evolution: A cross-country analysis.

Drug policies significantly impact public health and criminal justice outcomes, yet quantitative tools for systematically comparing approaches across jurisdictions remain limited. This paper uses a state-of-the-art comparative law method - leximetrics - to construct the Illicit Drugs Policy Indexes (IDPI), a valuable resource for assessing the evolution of drug policies over time within a specific country as well as across countries. The IDPI consists of a set of indexes corresponding to multiple dimensions of drug policy, including laws around consumption, possession and traffic.