more on drugs and harm reduction

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Today the Swedish minister of public health Maria Larsson announced that she would like it to be possible for the Swedish state to buy drugs.

The situation in Sweden today is that the police has to arrest someone carrying a new designer drug to have a sample to analyze she want’s to rationalise things buy letting the goverment proactive buy drugs for analyze and by that means spead up hte process of criminalizing the new drugs.

And finally she says the classic statement that shows that she has missed the whole pont: “The discussion about drugs must be brought up at the kitchen table and in schools.” It will not work! Today the Swedish official stance is that all drugs are “killers” and that you immediatly will get addicted and fall out of society. But the kids are not stupid, they see friends using drugs, they do research on internet and they discuss with their peers. And the conclusion for many of them? That the state and other authorities are lying! (There is a open letter to the minister stating the same thing here.)

So the day when we really need to warn about a new drug or a bad batch the kids will not listen.

In the modern transparent society we need to have policies based on evidence and facts, we also need to regain trust from drug users, drug abusers and teenagers at risk. This is one part of what i call harm reduction. Another Swedish blogger commented on that here.

Another part is needle exchange programs for those who inject drugs. There has been a trial program for over 20 years in the Malmö/Lund region and the other day there where an evaluation of the program. The conclution was that the needle exchange program did not help. But read this comment from the top medical officer handling epidemic diseases in the region:

(Translated from Swedish, se the link above for the original.)

“Last year 25 persons got HIV from sharing needles, 24 of theese live in Stockholm”

Mind you Stockholm does not have a needle exchange program… And one! case in the rest of the country, and we don’t even know if he is from the region with the needle exchange program. Not starting with needle exchange programs right away is just cynical!

And then we havn’t even considerd all the other possibilities of vaccinations against hepatitis, health checks and actually meeting and building up trus amongst the abusers.

Happily the city of Helsingborg has realised this, congratulations for doing something right in figthting the downside of drugs!

I have had some feedback on my post the other day about errors in the translation of official EU documents translating “drug use” to “drug abuse” when translating to Swedish and Danish. Some have asked me in private: “But shurly it must be a misstake on that page or a misstake by that translator” But no this is systematic.

For you that are billingual check out another English page and it’s Swedish translation. Note that “drug use” have turned into “Narkotikamissbruk” (Drug abuse in Swedish). The danish page is here, there the phrase is translated into “narkotikamisbrug”. And there is several examples all over those pages.

Please submit komments! And if you find any more misstranslated pages please let me know. Naturally not only pages related to drugs. All systematic translation errors are interesting, i will do something about them even if they go against my political compass. Cause it is so totally wrong to change the meaning of a text!

And to them who dissagree with my vievs above, would you fell ok if Swedish documents with “drug abuse” where to be translated into documents stating “drug use” instead? This is a 2 way street you know…