Drug Control and Drug Offences in the Nordic Countries: A Criminal Political Failure too often Interpreted as a Success

Abstract

The article aims at describing and analyzing drug policy and drug control in relation to Nordic criminal policy and criminal law policy. The background of the analysis is a remarkable inconsistency between, on the one hand, Nordic criminal policy in general and, on the other hand, drug control policy. The general criminal policy requires rationality and humanism, accentuating the importance of limiting penal solutions to cases where this is ultimo ratio. A limited use of imprisonment and a low incarceration rate have long been considered to be essential goals in themselves. But for drug policy we can observe a quite opposite attitude. Drugs must be strongly combated, and the means are primarily penal. The core questions to be examined in this article are how this inconsistency has come about and what the consequences of these two opposite attitudes are. The article begins with a description of how the drug policy has developed. Use of drugs was for a long time defined as an individual, medicinal or social problem. But since the beginning of the 1960s, drug use has been considered to be a crime problem, often as the most serious one. Afterwards a short description will be given of how penal legislation, rules of criminal procedure, and crime control have changed in order to achieve a more effective combat of drug crimes. Finally the present situation is described and analyzed from the perspective of whether it can be considered as a sound drug policy, a sound criminal policy, and sound criminal law policy to use imprisonment as extensively as it is done in the area of drug control. Is it rational and is it just to fill the prisons with drug offenders to the extent it is presently done?