Mark A.R. Kleiman

/in , , /by

Mark Kleiman died July 21, 2019. A memoriam to his life and career can be found here.

Mark Kleiman was Professor Emeritus of Public Policy in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and was employed at NYU at time of his death.

Mr. Kleiman was the author of Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control; of Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results;  and of When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment, listed by The Economist as one of the “Books of the Year” for 2009.  Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (co-authored with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken) was published in July 2011 by Oxford University Press. He edited the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis.

In addition to his academic work, Mr. Kleiman provided advice to local, state, and national governments on crime control and drug policy. Before he came to UCLA in 1995, he taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and at the University of Rochester. Outside of academia, he had worked for the U.S. Department of Justice (as Director of Policy and Management Analysis for the Criminal Division), for the City of Boston (as Deputy Director for Management of the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget), for Polaroid Corporation (as Special Assistant to the CEO, Edwin Land), and on Capitol Hill (as a legislative assistant to Congressman Les Aspin). He graduated from Haverford College (magna cum laude, majoring in political science, philosophy, and economics) and did his graduate work (M.P.P. and Ph.D.) at the Kennedy School.

Mr. Kleiman blogged at The Reality-Based Community, at samefacts.org

SELECTED BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

When Brute Force Fails
Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults — a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade.
Read more

Excess: Drug Policy for Results
Kleiman, M. Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Kleiman, M.Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Cost of Control. Greenwich, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989.
Read more

David Cohen

/in , , /by

David Cohen’s research looks at psychoactive drugs – prescribed, licit, and illicit – and considers some of their wanted and unwanted effects as socio-cultural phenomena “constructed” through language, attitudes, and policies, and therefore sensitive to social conditions and social change. He questions the assumption that psychiatric drugs are prescribed because they mostly act on neurochemical substrates of disorders or symptoms, and he helped conceive the “drug centered” model of psychiatric drug action as an alternative. Public and private institutions in the U.S., Canada, and France have funded him to conduct clinical-neuropsychological, qualitative, and epidemiological studies of patients, professionals, and the general population to examine uses to which psychoactive drugs are put and the effects people perceive from these uses.

His work also documents harms induced by mental health treatments (iatrogenesis) and examines social factors contributing to these harms. He studies the deliberate spread of ignorance (agnotology) through the capture of scientific organizations and research by corporations or professions in the mental health system. He charts the rise and fall of schools of thought in this system and how practitioners and historians justify their adoption and repudiation. He pursues national and international comparative research on involuntary psychiatric detentions and treatments of people who experience extreme states.

In his counseling work, Cohen developed person-centered methods to assess how psychiatric drugs affect people, to safely discontinue from them, and to provide non-medical helpers entry into the contested psychopharmacology scene. He has given workshops on this topic around the world. He designed and launched the online CriticalThinkRx Critical Curriculum on Psychotropic Medication for child welfare professionals in 2009, since taken by thousands of practitioners and updated in 2018. Tested in a 16-month longitudinal controlled study, CriticalThinkRx was shown to reduce psychiatric prescribing to children in foster care. He has consulted with governments, agencies, courts, professional groups, community groups, care providers and legal professionals in several countries seeking to reduce harms of prescribed psychotropic drugs to children, adults, and older people in different settings.

Cohen has authored or co-authored over 120 articles and chapters. His edited books include Challenging the Therapeutic State (1990), Médicalisation et contrôle social (1996), and Critical New Perspectives on ADHD (2006). His co-authored books include Guide critique des médicaments de l’âme (1995), Your Drug May Be Your Problem (1999/2007), and Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis, and Drugs (2015). He has received awards for his publications, research, teaching, mentoring, and advocacy. His views have been published in leading newspapers and other popular media.

Cohen previously taught at University of Montreal and Florida International University. In Montreal, he directed the Health and Prevention Social Research Group, and at FIU, he was PhD Program Director and Interim Director of the School of Social Work. He held the Fulbright-Tocqueville Chair to France in 2012, and the Marjorie Crump Chair in Social Welfare at UCLA from 2013-2018. At the Luskin School, Cohen served as Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development between 2018-2023 and is currently Associate Dean.

Selected recent publications

Discontinuing Psychiatric Medications from Participants in Randomized Controlled Trials: A systematic Review (2019)

Incidences of Involuntary Psychiatric Detentions in 25 U.S. States (2020)

Withdrawal Effects Confounding: Another Sign of Needed Paradigm Shift in Psychopharmacology Research (2020)

Michelle Talley

/in , , , , , /by

Michelle Talley is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker whose main area of focus is working with youth and families as it relates to Public Child Welfare. Other areas of interest are issues dealing with domestic violence, substance use, education, and attachment in youth and families.

As a field consultant with the Inter-University Consortium, a collaborative effort of Southern California social work programs that trains social workers in the area of child welfare, Ms. Talley works with first and second-year MSW students placed in the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS).

Ms. Talley has also worked as a mental health clinician dealing with children impacted by abuse and neglect within their family nucleus. Most of the children and families worked with were also dealing with substance use/abuse, criminal issues, education, poverty, and mental health issues in which adversely impacted their family dynamics. Ms. Talley has also worked as an adoption social worker with Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. The focus was to locate families and individuals who were interested in providing a permanent home for children in the Child Welfare system.