In Sweden, drugs and drug use are conceived in yet another way, and this forms the basis of the Swedish drug policy paradigm. First, Sweden is a "temperance culture," a country where the temperance movement gained a strong foothold in the 19th century. The principle aim of the Swedish temperance movement was to achieve a total ban on alcohol. Between 1917 and 1955 Sweden had an alcohol rationing system, and even today embraces a comparatively restrictive alcohol policy. This tradition makes a restrictive drug policy a logical option. The current alcohol policy is based on the "total consumption" model, which holds that the more people use alcohol, the more they will abuse it and the greater the total harm caused by alcohol will be. The implication for policy, then, is to limit alcohol use through the instruments of price and availability. The total consumption model is assumed to be valid for drugs as well: the more people use drugs, the more they will abuse them, the more people that will become addicted, and the greater the damage to society. For policy, it is further assumed, this means preventing the use of any drug, and cannabis in particular, since it is the most widely used illicit drug. Of course, a premise of this model is the accuracy of the stepping stone hypothesis.
A further influence on Swedish policy were the theories of the physician Nils Bejerot, who defined drug use as a contagious disease in which one drug user can contaminate another person (Boekhout van Solinge 1997c). This makes the drug epidemic particularly difficult to combat. Drug users are considered irreplaceable elements in the "drug chain." Drug dealers can and will be replaced by others, but the users are the ones who keep the engine going. Thus, the implication for policy is to target the drug users at the street level.
The strict Swedish drug policy is clearly linked to the way Swedish society deals with deviance in general. Sweden is a homogeneous country where social values are oriented toward conformity, without much allowance for deviance (Daun 1996). Unlike the Netherlands, Sweden does not have a strong tradition of liberalism and individual freedom. In fact, liberalism is viewed very negatively (Tham 1995). In 1977 the Swedish parliament proclaimed a drug-free society as the official policy aim. Since that time, the policy has grown more repressive, fueled to a high degree by a moral panic in which people have viewed drugs as posing a major threat to society. The decline of the Swedish welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s created an atmosphere in which drugs could be defined as an "ideal" social problem and singled out as a scapegoat on which other social problems could be blamed (Christie and Bruun 1991). The fight against drugs has become the symbol for the protection of that which is "typically Swedish" (Tham 1995). This specific exorcising function indicates why, since joining the EU, Sweden has been the most vehement opponent of drug liberalization and harm reduction initiatives.
In the Swedish model, prevalence figures, and especially incidence rates, are seen as the prime indicators for policy evaluation. The emphasis is on keeping the incidence rate as low as possible. This explains the apprehension of Swedish policy makers exhibit toward the Dutch model, which regards experimental drug use as not a serious problem. Although drug experimentation among teenagers is certainly discouraged in Holland, it is also seen as an inevitable phenomenon of youth culture. The implication for policy is to steer the inevitable experiments in the right direction by giving information that is credible and not only emphasizing the negative effects of drugs. The clear distinction made in the Netherlands between soft and hard drugs is thought to deter young people from moving on to addictive drugs. In the eyes of the Swedes, this must have resulted from an out-of-control situation, where the authorities simply gave up and adopted laissez-faire attitudes. Ironically, both Swedish and Dutch policy makers are convinced they are on the right track, and that their policies have kept the numbers of drug addicts relatively low. More specifically, the Swedes believe their restrictive policies (particularly those with regard to cannabis) are the basis of their success, while the Dutch think their tolerant cannabis policy accounts in part for the country's lower numbers of hard drug addicts. A more convincing explanation for why the two countries both appear to have relatively low numbers of drug addicts is that they are rich welfare states with good social policies and relatively few people living in the gutter.
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What position do the drug policies of the Netherlands now occupy within this general European picture? On the one hand, the increased cooperation with other EU countries might make it harder for the Dutch government to maintain its traditional liberal approach, or at least to deviate too far from the center. All EU countries have committed themselves in international treaties to fight drugs (not only the Treaty of the EU, known as the Maastricht Treaty, but also the UN Drug Conventions). On the other hand, in many European countries one sees that on the national level, and especially on the local level, measures are increasingly being implemented that more or less resemble the Dutch policies. Within the European context, the Swedes have now become more of a maverick than the Dutch. All around Europe, approaches to drugs have become more pragmatic and tolerant, a trend that is especially apparent at the local level. Since the EU has instructed member states to work together in their practical efforts on drugs, it will probably be the developments on the local and practical level that will eventually determine future European drug policies.
http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/boekhout.dutch.html
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