Читать книгу Drug Policy - Группа авторов - Страница 10

The white paper The Fight against Drugs, which we discussed above as the ideological foundation of current Danish drug policy, acknowledges that the drug problem will not go away. It is a social fact with which we have to live. This does not mean that Danish drug policy, and more particularly its prohibitionist foundation, is seen as a failure. Quite the reverse: Prohibition is seen to have kept the prevalence of illegal drug use in check. Since the 1990s the use of illegal drugs has received much public and political attention. One reason for this has been a significant increase in the prevalence of illegal drug use in Denmark from the mid-1990s to the early years of the new millennium mentioned above, particularly among young people. Another related reason has been signs of what has been called a new drug culture among young people (Sundhedsstyrelsen 2000; 2004; Københavns Kommune 2006). In this drug culture the use of illegal drugs is seen as a mainstream phenomenon, which is no longer associated with particular subcultures and stigmatisation. According to the reports, such use is regarded as socially acceptable behaviour even among young people who do not use drugs. Following this it is also reported that drug use is no longer a clandestine activity, but something done in the open. Users and non-users are no longer necessarily separated from each other. This all adds up to a description of drug use in these reports as an individual consumption choice. These reports about an increasing prevalence and acceptance of drug use among young people as an ordinary activity have been supplemented by numerous newspaper stories about the ubiquity of drugs, about how drugs are everywhere young people go as an almost natural part of their environment. Together these reports paint a picture of what the international literature has called a ‘normalisation’ of drugs among young people (Parker 2005), something which seems to have been one of the governing images behind recent Danish drug policy.⁹

This image has been part of the motivation behind the shift towards a zero-tolerance policy on possession, which we have already discussed based on the argument that it is important to send a clear signal of the unacceptability of drug use in the face of changing norms about this activity. But it has also been an important factor behind a project carried out from 2003 to 2007 in which 14 municipalities were to engage a number of different players as stakeholders in the development of local drug policies (Sundhedsstyrelsen 2005; Sundhedsstyrelsen & Muusmann Consulting 2007). The aim of the project was to limit the availability of drugs and the number of young people who use and experiment with drugs. The project was called ‘Get the drugs out of town’ (‘Narkoen ud af Byen’ in Danish), and it crossed the boundaries between state, market and civil society by engaging parents, schools, sports clubs, commercial and non-commercial party venues etc., as stakeholders. This project is perhaps the most visible sign of a political strategy which attempts to regulate drugs by governing through the local community and creating networks of players to bridge the gap between public and private, commercial and non-commercial.

Part of the project involved institutions developing their own drug policies. This is, however, not something that only happens as part of an official government policy. Whether it is because of the image of the normalisation of drug use or not, the question of how to handle drugs seems today to be a matter of immediate concern in a variety of different contexts. And because of these concerns players and institutions, which are not usually thought of in terms of drug policy are now involved in the development of ways of handling drugs. Private enterprises, sports clubs and other groups and societies actively think about and develop ways of handling drug use. There is an emerging market for private drug solutions; parents and other interested parties are taking it upon themselves to conduct drug control; drug users themselves are letting themselves be heard about drug control and drug treatment; and in local communities citizens are organising ways of developing drug solutions or putting pressure on public authorities.

The development of new drug policy networks addresses not only young recreational drug users or employees and other members of ‘mainstream’ society, but also marginalised hard drug users like those living in the transit areas of our big cities. In some of these areas citizens organise themselves in various ways in order to develop drug solutions or to affect the way in which public authorities and local institutions handle drug problems. In the neighbourhood Vesterbro in Copenhagen two different groups of citizens organised in order to solve the problem of drug use and drug dealing being a nuisance to the local community. One group of citizens saw removing drug users as a solution, the other argued for more harm reduction measures. The former saw the social work done in one of the churches in the parish as the major problem to why hard drug users congregated in the area. With the primary agenda of stopping this social work candidates ran for election to the parish council. They did not, however, succeed. On the other hand, in the same community a network of different players including both public authorities (e.g. for funding) and local citizens has been created in order to develop new drug policies for the community. One of the steps taken is the establishment of an organisation that promotes ‘health rooms’ – a place where drug users can come to inject their prescribed drugs – as a solution to the local drug problem (Olsen 2008).

Drug policy today is therefore not only a matter of government policy and government institutions, but also something, which is developed and carried out by networks of players and institutions, which are both public and private. This means that the organisation of how we live with drugs is following trends which can also be found in other policy areas like social policy and crime control (Garland 1996; Loader & Sparks 2002), where private players and public-private partnerships are part of policy development and policy delivery. This suggests that even if it is still relevant to pay close attention to government policy and the activities of government institutions, something could be learned by occasionally shifting our focus from the institutions of government to the activity of governance (Osborne & Geabler 1992) in our analysis of drug policy, i.e. how families are advised to develop their own drug policies in order to be prepared, when its younger members will be confronted with illegal drugs. In the following paragraphs we will present two analytical perspectives which we suggest may be fruitful in the analysis of drug policy if we make the practicalities of how drug problems are defined and solutions developed the centre of our attention, irrespective of who is involved in this work.