In this issue

Citation

Nielsen, B., Klein, A. and Frank, V. (2013), "In this issue", Drugs and Alcohol Today, Vol. 13 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/dat.2013.54413aaa.002

In this issue

Article Type: In this issue From: Drugs and Alcohol Today, Volume 13, Issue 1

Research on drugs and alcohol has a strong social scientific grounding in Scandinavia, for example questions asked often concern: how are drugs or alcohol perceived in the population, are they articulated as problematic and by whom, how is society responding through control policies, prevention strategies or treatment services? Some of the questions pursued in this issue concern how different substances are articulated as policy problems. In the article “The ideological drug problem”, Johan Edman traces the role of ideology in relation to how drug problems and the bureaucratic management of drug treatment have been articulated in Sweden between 1960 and 2000. The analysis demonstrates how drugs are understood as a key political and societal problem that is alien to the traditional Swedish culture. Never far from the surface is a discourse on cultural contamination where drugs as well as jazz music, Eastern religions or European Union regulations are eroding the core values. There is a sense of cross-party unanimity about drug policy as a national defense, which covers diverse interpretations of the wider complexity of class politics or welfare dependence. Agreement on the idea that corrupting foreign influences have to be countered by a principles of “democracy” and “community” as well as the therapeutic quality of rural idyll has led to many treatment centres being located in the Swedish country side.

In the next article in this issue, “The moral entrepreneurship of anti-khat campaigners in Sweden – a critical discourse analysis”, attention is shifted from policies connecting ideas of Swedish culture to drugs and drug treatment to mobilization against khat use in the Somali diaspora in Sweden. Johan Nordgren analyzes how certain kinds of knowledge about khat is spread to the public via the media. Anti-campaigners articulate an image of khat use as a threat to the social cohesion of the Somali diaspora in Sweden. While the previous two articles trace ideological battles and policies that largely relate perceived drug problems to social relations, the next article analyzes how biomedical discourses are gaining prominence as new magic bullets for “explaining” addiction in Sweden. In the article “Knowledge production, communication and utilization: studying biomedical alcohol research”, and Katarina Winter analyze how addiction is explained through a biomedical perspective (genes, brain receptors, biomarkers, DNA) in newspaper articles between 1995 and 2010, and how lay people perceive such articles and hence addiction. Further, the authors present an analytical framework for their next research project, focusing on how biomedical knowledge is produced, communicated and utilized by different key actors (biomedical researchers, politicians and other stakeholders, the electronic media).

Policy and practice are connected in “Brief alcohol interventions in Norwegian natal care: a neoliberal mode of governing and social consequences”. Mette Irmgard Snertingdal explores alcohol intervention ideas in an educational program for midwifes and doctors in Norway. Analytically, Snertingdal fruitfully applies a governmentality perspective to demonstrate how motivational interviewing and screening programs make pregnant woman self-governing subjects. It is argued that this mode of governance is both totalizing and individualizing, and hence, that it departs from the way that Nordic policies usually give priority to general control measures aimed at the population, that is, not the self-governance of individual pregnant women.

In the article “Cannabis use during a life course – integrating cannabis use into everyday life” by Vibeke Asmussen Frank, Anne-Sofie Christensen and Helle Vibeke Dahl the authors explore how cannabis users integrate cannabis consumption into daily life. Based on qualitative interviews the authors focus on cannabis users’ reasoning in relation to what, when and where they regard cannabis consumption acceptable and/or unacceptable in their everyday lives. The authors argue that studying how realities become meaningful and agreeable for those who live them is also a study of moralities or moral reasoning. The interview narratives show how – by employing particular strategies in relation to smoking cannabis – the cannabis users adhere to more wider, societal norms and values around acceptable and unacceptable use of cannabis as well as ideas of “ordinary” life.

With the article “Collectivist and individualist values traits in Finnish and Italian adolescents’ alcohol norms” by Matilda Hellman and Sara Rolando, we move away from policy towards a cross-cultural comparison. The article highlights how justifications of “correct ways of drinking” are related to culturally shared meaning-makings. In exploring this issue, the authors apply theories of “individualist and collectivist (I-C) value traits” to interpret their empirical material from Italy and Finland.

Bjarke Nielsen, Axel Klein and Vibeke Frank