Swedish drug policy should give the impression of Switzerland

Imagine, a Swedish minister is doing something as drastic as pushing drugs free of charge to heroinists.

For her political courage, Switzerland's Ruth Dreifuss was hailed this week by the Stockholm Criminology Prize.

In the 1990s, Ruth Dreifuss, Interior Minister and later Federal President of Switzerland, was the first political advocate of a single attempt to test a new treatment of heroin consumers.

Abusers who failed methadone treatment were allowed to inject legally prescribed heroin into institutions under medical supervision.

Could experience help reduce drug-related crime and improve the health of drug addicts?

The opposition was lacking, expressed cautiously, no. But Dreifuss was standing right in the audience.

The result was incredible. The death rate among dentists has been halved and the crime rate of abusers has dropped considerably.

Nowadays, the treatment is regularly available in Switzerland and new attempts have been made in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Canada. With results that match those of Switzerland.

For his political courage, Dreifuss was awarded the Stockholm Prize for Criminology on Monday, an annual international award created in 2006.

She shares it with criminology professor Peter Reuter, who caught the attention of the international community when he explained and defended the Swiss attempt.

Sweden then? What would happen if a leading politician even offered heroin bought by the government? What would it look like in a country that has for decades been carrying out a fundamentalist drug policy, where explosions must already be politically infected forever before being tried?

I do not rule out that moral panic reaches previously unknown levels on the Richter scale and that the unfortunate minister was forced to abandon his eyelids and spend the rest of his life with knowledge it was a crime for which forgiveness is impossible.

But there are flashes of light. Swedish drug policy, which has been the scariest for decades, a policy that has led to a higher drug-related mortality than in most Western European countries, is slowing down.

It started with the then Minister of Public Health, Gabriel Wikström, in early 2016, who issued a speech saying that we "had been painted in a corner and perceived as extremists".

As one of the last EU countries, Sweden has started to advocate for harm reduction, ie actions that, at the same time, are dogmatic era, were considered flum liberalism and drug addict.

Since then, something has happened. Following a change in law, local politicians will no longer be able to veto splash replacement. Unfortunately, there is still only one-third of the county councils, but it is going in the right direction.

And last year, the Public Health Authority and the National Board of Health and Social Affairs jointly tabled a proposal for various efforts in the area of ​​care and damage to the government.

Ruth Dreifuss has no place for contemporary Swedish politics. There is political radicalism about the introduction of the most neoliberal school in the world or the closing of borders.

However, in Sweden, the drug policy has made little progress.

November 7, 2018 2:50 p.m.