Dealing with Drugs in Europe.
An Investigation of European Drug Control Experiences:
France, the Netherlands and Sweden

By Tim Boekhut van Solinge
The Hague: BJu Legal Publishers, 2004

European drug policy is an under-researched area. There exists few scientific studies that cover more than one country. Tim Boekhut van Solinge tries to bridge that gap by simultaneously focusing on France, Sweden and the Netherlands – three countries in Europe that for many years have represented different approaches. He writes sympathetically. But I’m afraid that his conceptualisation of “national drug control systems” blocks rather facilitates an understanding of current developments in Europe.

The Dutch approach is associated with a liberal view on cannabis and an emphasis on public health rather than enforcement. Sweden is linked to a comprehensive care and control model. In the public debate, the countries are often counterposed as two extremes on a continuum. The French approach is seen to rely mostly on a centralised criminal justice system. The author takes this idea of fundamental national differences as his point of departure, and asks why the three countries have developed different “national drug control systems”. He doesn’t study whether they are different, or the relative impact of the on-going harmonization of drug policy within the EU. It is taken for granted that drug policies are a strictly national matter.

It is possible that the origin of the current drug policies can be analysed as mainly national. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, when the drugs were re-discovered as a political issue in many Western countries, the policy response was heavily influenced by different political mobilisations and theoretical interventions in each of the three countries. In Sweden, for example, drugs were at the centre of a reactionary moralistic popular mobilisation supplemented by theories that conceived of illegal drugs as a contagious epidemic. In the Netherlands, different drug policies were implemented under the influence of a wide-spread cannabis culture and labelling theory.

But I don’t think that the idea of national drug control systems is very helpful to understand the development since the 1990’s. Boekhut van Solinge acknowledges that there are signs of convergence. In the Netherlands, the long-standing emphasis on public health is increasingly supplemented by harsh measures; in France and Sweden, on the other hand, harm reduction is gaining ground. But the conceptualisation of national drug control systems as more or less self-enclosed entities does not allow for transnational developments or actors such as the pharmaceutical industry or EU-level policy groups.

The recent developments do not only run counter to national boundaries but also defies any interpretation that attempts to analyse drug policies on a single scale stretching from restrictiveness to liberalisation. In many European countries, there are indications that repression and harm reduction are on the rise at the same time. The Lisbon-based European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) reports an increase in drug law offences in the majority of European countries during the last decade. This suggests an increased police priority on drug users. I would also guess that at least a part of the rise of the prison population in most European countries consists of drug addicts – although statistics on the number of imprisoned drug addicts are notoriously unreliable. At the same time, harm reduction measures are proliferating. The prime example is substitution treatment for opiate dependence. For a long time, many countries, including France and Sweden, were reluctant to grant methadone or subutex to heroin users. But nowadays legally prescribed subutex, a synthetic opiate, is common in France and Sweden. EMCDDA reports a sevenfold increase of clients in substitution treatment over the last decade. Last year, their number exceeded half a million.

The development appears paradoxical. A demonisation of drug users and a mobilisation of the entire criminal justice system co-exist with public health concerns and business strategies of large pharmaceutical companies. This book cannot discuss this pattern as it only sees specific national trajectories. Yet it would be interesting to investigate the complex regulation of drug use and try to make sense of the simultaneous penalisation and medicalisation.