Peter Reuter, Ph.D.

Dr. Reuter received his PhD in Economics from Yale. From 1981 to 1993, He was a Senior Economist in the Washington office of the RAND Corporation. In 1989, he founded RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center, a multi-disciplinary research program begun with funding from a number of foundations. He directed it from 1989-1993. His early research focused on the organization of illegal markets and resulted in the publication of Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (MIT Press, 1983), which won the Leslie Wilkins award as most outstanding book of the year in criminology and criminal justice. Since 1985 most of his research has dealt with alternative approaches to controlling drug problems, both in the United States and Western Europe. His book (with Robert MacCoun) entitled Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Places, Times and Vices (Cambridge University Press) appeared in August 2001. Dr. Reuter was a member of the National Research Council Committee on Law and Justice from 1997-2002. He served on the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Federal Regulation of Methadone (1992-1994) and the IOM panel on Assessing the Scientific Base for Reducing Tobacco-Related Harm (2000). He was on the Board of Directors of CPDD from 1994-1998 and was also a member of the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s Committee on Data, Research and Evaluation from 1996-2002. The Attorney General appointed him as one of five non-governmental members of the Interagency Task Force on Methamphetamine in 1997. He testifies frequently before Congress and has addressed senior policy audiences in many countries. He has served as a consultant to numerous government agencies and foreign organizations. Dr. Reuter is currently a Senior Economist at RAND.