From Oberoende
The official magazine for RFHL (National Organization for Help to Narcotics and Drug Addicts).

info@rfhl.se

http://www.rfhl.se

Translation by Jonas Thorell and John Yates

By Leif Lenke, Lecturer in criminology, Stockholm University

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRUG ABUSE IN SWEDEN

Drug abuse (narkotikamissbruket) in the form we observe it in society today began in earnest during the 1960’s. Sweden was actually one of the first countries in Europe to develop an epidemic of intravenous drug abuse. The rest of Europe has since followed suit.

The distinction between misuse and abuse is perhaps one of degree, but it has a qualitatively different political impact. It is puzzling to me that people whose lives center around words would be so indifferent to their misuse. Or is it abuse?)

Drug abuse has played a major role in the control policy debate and has had great effect upon criminal statistics and criminal policy. Narcotics are also the most common reason given for intensifying police co-operation in Europe.

Forms Of Abuse In Sweden

Characteristic of heavy drug abuse in Sweden is the large scale injection of amphetamine that began amongst Swedish abusers. This is in contrast to other countries where heroin became the dominant drug of heavy abuse. Amphetamine differs from heroin in that it is a stimulating and activating drug and not numbing and sleep inducing. Another difference is that heroin, but not amphetamine, cause strong withdrawal symptoms. This has the effect of making heroin more dominant in the lifestyles of its abusers as they need maintenance doses approximately every four hours. Amphetamine addicts on the other hand must stop their abuse after a few days as the drug no longer has any effect and tiredness begins to take over.

Why amphetamine became so dominant amongst Swedish abusers has not been thoroughly investigated. Abuse began amongst bohemians and artists in Stockholm during the 1950’s and spread from there to the criminal underworld. As a result, new recruits to drug abuse were persons connected with institutions such as prisons and juvenile delinquent reform schools.

From the middle of the 1970’s, heroin abuse enters into the picture but has so far not constituted more than one third of the total of heavy drug abuse. Heroin abuse seems however to be increasing its share of heavy abuse over time. During the whole period since the beginning of the 1960’s the most common form of drug abuse has been the smoking of cannabis. This is still so today despite the introduction of newer drugs like ecstasy and cocaine during the 1990’s.

The Official Picture Of The Development Of Drug Abuse

The overall picture of the development of Swedish drug abuse has long been unclear. The official version can be summed up by saying that the liberal narcotics policies of the 1960’s and 70’s resulted in steadily increasing problems until a shift in policy in the direction of tougher laws around 1980 pushed back drug abuse on a scale that lacked precedent in Europe. The figures quoted are based upon two types of statistics.

The first and most important concern the frequency with which young people have tried drugs. Statistics from the Institute of Public Health (1993) which have been presented to the rest of the world show that experimentation with drugs amongst young people dropped drastically with the policy shift of 1979-80.

(Ed. note: This is essentially the same as the official use view. The decline in marijuana experimentation in the 1980s is cited as proof of the success of the "Just Say No" campaign. The fact that there was a crack cocaine epidemic during this period is conveniently ignored. Oddly, even the Clinton administration, which takes a lot of political heat for its "failure" to continue the "success" of the Reagan-Bush years does not raise this point. Perhaps because this fact would be pro-drug and therefore double-plus-ungood. )

A critical examination of the official version of the development of abuse.

In Swedish drug policy there are differing opinions on two crucial points. These differences concern cause and effect in regard to policy and the development of abuse. There are different opinions regarding time context, that is to say, when developments went in one direction or the other and to what extent this can be linked to differences in policy between the different periods.

Some facts are clear. For instance the peak in the Swedish drug epidemic, according to all sources, occurred at the beginning of the 70’s. That is 5-10 years before the new policy, which took all the credit for the dramatic decrease even though drug abuse was decreasing before the new policy had time to take effect.

Another fact is that the decline that is used as evidence of reduced new recruitment to heavy drug abuse occurred abruptly at the end of the 1980’s. That is more than five years after the new policy achieved full effect. This conclusion can be drawn from the fact that it is only amongst the absolute youngest that a reduction can be seen to have occurred in the statistics of 1992 compared with those of 1979.

One question that needs to be asked is that if there are not other explanatory factors at work than an increase in law enforcement involvement in narcotics policy. It has been possible to show that not only a reduction in experimentation with narcotics occurred in the 1980’s. There was also a decrease in alcohol consumption and that cannot be attributed to the police or to the effects of narcotics policy. This is even more true of sniffing which also shows a similar downward trend.

Regarding the reduced proportion of young heavy drug abusers in the figures for 1992, two factors are worth taking into consideration. One is that youth unemployment in Sweden during the 1980’s was at its lowest ever at around 2 %. Compare that number with the average for the European Union at the same time of around 10-30 %. The connection between youth unemployment and the level of drug abuse, especially regarding heroin, has been shown in a comparative study between several member states of the European Union.

The fact that the decline occurred during the last years of the 80’s also indicates that the HIV epidemic, which was given much attention around 1985, can have had an effect upon the prevalence of abusers. It has been shown that this epidemic caused panic among Swedish abusers.

A similar decline can also be found in the development of heavy drug abuse in Norway at around this time

Epidemic Vs Trend

The founding father of "The drug free society", Nils Bejerot, introduced the term epidemic as a way to illustrate how drug abuse develops. This was met with some justifiable criticism, since the introduction of this medical term implied that abusers infected innocent people and especially young people with their abuse.

The epidemic model is accepted within the social sciences to describe fads and other social phenomenon. Characteristic for such "epidemics" is that they tend to rise sharply then decline and not uncommonly to more or less die out. The development of the Swedish amphetamine epidemic could be interpreted as such a phenomenon since abuse and especially new recruitment diminished to only a fraction of its original size within just a couple of years and with only comparatively modest measures taken by the authorities.

On the other hand, when the authorities at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 90’s turned the thumbscrews on drug abusers, no noticeable positive effect on abuse was observed. Drug use was criminalised in 1988 and was intended to give "clear signals" to young people that experimenting with drugs was not only unacceptable and deplorable but criminal as well. This did not accomplish anything.

Nor was anything accomplished when the law was tightened in 1993 by introducing prison into the scale of punishments as well as carrying out tens of thousands of urine tests in order to detect drug abusers early and either frighten them or force them into compulsory treatment programmes.

If we examine another side of the "new" Swedish drug policy, forced treatment has not either been able to show positive results. Instead, Sweden has what is perhaps the highest mortality rate in the western world amongst heroin addicts. Narcotics related deaths are also continuing to rise in Sweden.

It is also significant that now, as the figures for drug experimentation amongst young people have risen dramatically for five successive years, this is suddenly no longer regarded by the authorities as an indication that hard drug use is also rising. Instead this abuse is attributed to "party drugs" ("partydroger") and fads etc.

The fact is however that the greatest increase is in cannabis abuse (cannabismissbruk) and this is still most commonly found amongst young persons of low education living in larger cities.