What can we learn from Sweden's drug policy experience?

Sweden is well-known for its commitment to a vision of "the drug-free society". In recent years, Sweden's drug policies have been the focus of considerable attention and debate, which may be seen in the context of both the ten year United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS) review of international drug control and a much broader discourse of drug policy reform that has achieved growing political salience in many parts of the world. The Swedish example has been deployed by those arguing for a zero tolerance approach to drug policies and abstinence-driven treatments for dependent use (for example, the UK Conservative party), together with those (such as Antonio Maria Costa at the United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime) seeking to defend the current UN treaty-based system from widespread calls for change. In a 2006 report entitled Sweden's Successful Drug Policy, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reviewed the country's policy model and tracked the development of its progressively more restrictive approach following a brief experiment with relatively liberal policies in the 1960s. In its conclusions, the report argued strongly that Sweden's unambiguously repressive stance had resulted in low levels of the prevalence of drug use, that these policies were therefore successful and should be adopted by other nation states. As a consequence of this and other interventions, Sweden has begun to function as a symbol of the efficacy of restrictive drug laws and policies, a utopia against which the allegedly dystopian potentials of more tolerant societies can be measured. At the same time, for drug policy reformers and advocates of harm reduction, the country encapsulates the failures that may be expected to flow from policies driven by an over-arching ideological commitment to abstinence. This briefing paper will analyse Swedish drug control policy in its legal, clinical, political, social and cultural dimensions and consider the claims and policy-objectives it has been used to support. In the course of this analysis, it will explore the implications of Sweden's model, if any, for other countries. Such an undertaking is, of necessity, a complex one, involving a wide-ranging discussion of the factors implicated and an argument possessed of many strands. [Extract]