Brendan Hughes has been working at EMCDDA since 2001 in the field of national drug legislation, after gaining a Masters degree in International Criminal Law (LLM) specialising in narcotics law.
He manages the European Legal Database on Drugs (ELDD) which displays “penalties at a glance” for drug use, possession and trafficking laws, and has written various comparative overviews and analyses on different topics such as drug classifications, threshold quantities, alternatives to punishment, drug driving, and control systems for new psychoactive substances. He published the first European quantitative comparison of drug law sentencing and outcome statistics in 2009, followed by the first European qualitative comparison of trafficking scenarios in 2016.
He has advised ministers and parliamentary committees on issues such as decriminalisation, alternatives to punishment and cannabis legalisation, and has authored several articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Brendan Hughes is a British national.
