"Some of us need to be taken care of": young adults' perspectives on support and help in drug reducing interventions in coercive contexts in Denmark and the UK

This paper provides an account of young people’s experiences of and perspectives on help and support in drug reducing interventions. It is based on interviews with young people age 14–25 who were in contact with the Criminal Justice System (CJS) and, at the same time, participated in a drug reducing intervention. The interview data forms part of the EU funded EPPIC project. Two main themes emerged from the young peoples’ accounts that cut across different types of interventions and social systems in both countries. The first revolves around the ‘system’ of welfare, criminal justice, health and educational services and the barriers young people encountered in navigating the system to find help. The second revolves around the young people’s experiences with professionals, including what they appreciated and what they found problematic in professionals’ approach to them. Basing our analysis on data from two different countries, we are able to emphasize similarities in the young peoples’ perspectives, despite being enrolled in different drug reducing and CJS interventions. The insights gained indicate a need for systems and service changes that can facilitate a better balance between building individual resilience and providing appropriate, timely and adequate support within a ‘resilience-building environmen

'I like money, I like many things'. The relationship between drugs and crime from the perspective of young people in contact with criminal justice systems

Based on research undertaken as part of the EU funded EPPIC project, this paper aims to update and elaborate on the relationship between drug use and offending behaviours by exploring variations within a cross-national sample of drug-experienced young people in touch with criminal justice systems. Adopting a trajectory-based approach, interviews were undertaken with 198 young people aged 15–25 in six European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, and UK). Data were analysed by applying the Bennett and Holloway categorization of the drugs-crime link, with a focus on the concept of social exclusion as developed by Seddon. Three main types of mechanisms (economic, pharmaceutical, and lifestyles) are used to interpret the data, showing how the relationship between drugs and offending can vary according to type of substances and over time. Furthermore, it can be associated with very different degrees of social exclusion and needs. The results suggest that while economic inequalities still play key roles in explaining drug use and offending, both behaviours can originate from a state of relative deprivation, resulting from the contradictions inherent in ‘bulimic societies’ that raise aspirations and desires while providing young people scarce opportunities for self-realisation and social recognition

Stakeholder ownership: a theoretical framework for cross national understanding and analyses of stakeholder involvement in issues of substance use, problem use and addiction

This project contributes to understanding of the role of different stakeholder groups in the formulation and implementation of policy in the addictions field in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland and the UK. It comprises a number of case studies which draw on a range of theoretical frameworks to examine stakeholder dynamics at international, national and local levels. Mainly qualitative methods were used: interviews, policy and documentation analyses, webcrawler network analysis, and simple surveys; one case study was based on a survey only. The case studies fall into four main categories: three focus on controversial issues in drug treatment policy and practice – opioid substitution treatment, drug consumption rooms, and heroin assisted treatment; three look at stakeholder activity in alcohol control and public health; one pilot case study considers the potential role of researchers in the development of a scientific network around gambling; and one looks at the role of nurses in implementing brief interventions. In addition, themes explored across case studies included the role of evidence and stakeholder activity, drug users as stakeholders, and the role of external stakeholders on national policy. Professional stakeholders at implementation level and families and drug users as stakeholders are also considered. The case studies revealed that, in many instances, the addictions field is characterised by tensions between groups, by entrenched relationships between some addiction-specific stakeholder groups and powerful political stakeholders, and by the dominance of some forms of evidence over other forms of knowledge. Science and scientists are only influential in policy terms if their scientific findings ‘fit’ with the wider political context. Nevertheless, at least within the European context, there are opportunities for new stakeholder groups to emerge and gain policy salience and there are opportunities for stakeholders to challenge prevailing frames of understanding the addictions and prevailing modes of responding to problems of substance misuse and addiction

Stakeholder influences on drug and alcohol policy processes

Guest editoria

Global patterns of domestic cannabis cultivation : sample characteristics and patterns of growing across eleven countries

Aims: To provide an overview of: demographic characteristics; experiences with growing cannabis; methods and scale of growing operations; reasons for growing; personal use of cannabis and other drugs; participation in cannabis and other drug markets; contacts with the criminal justice system for respondents to an online survey about cannabis cultivation drawn from eleven countries (N=6530). Important similarities and differences between the national samples recruited will be discussed. Method: This paper utilizes data from the online web survey of predominantly ‘small-scale’ cannabis cultivators in eleven countries conducted by the Global Cannabis Cultivation Research Consortium (GCCRC). Here we focus primarily on descriptive statistics to highlight key similarities and differences across the different national samples. Findings: Overall there was a great deal of similarity across countries in terms of: demographic characteristics; experiences with growing cannabis; methods and scale of growing operations; reasons for growing; use of cannabis and other drugs; participation in cannabis and other drug markets, and contacts with the criminal justice system. In particular, we can recognise that a clear majority of those small-scale cannabis cultivators who responded to our survey is primarily motivated for reasons other than making money from cannabis supply and have minimal involvement in drug dealing or other criminal activities. These growers generally come from ‘normal’ rather than ‘deviant’ backgrounds. Some differences do exist between the samples drawn from different countries suggesting that local factors (political, geographical, cultural etc.) may have some influence on how small-scale cultivators operate, although differences in recruitment strategies in different countries may also account for some differences observed

Dispersal strategies, few dominating or many coexisting: the effect of environmental spatial structure and multiple sources of mortality.

Interspecific competition, life history traits, environmental heterogeneity and spatial structure as well as disturbance are known to impact the successful dispersal strategies in metacommunities. However, studies on the direction of impact of those factors on dispersal have yielded contradictory results and often considered only few competing dispersal strategies at the same time. We used a unifying modeling approach to contrast the combined effects of species traits (adult survival, specialization), environmental heterogeneity and structure (spatial autocorrelation, habitat availability) and disturbance on the selected, maintained and coexisting dispersal strategies in heterogeneous metacommunities. Using a negative exponential dispersal kernel, we allowed for variation of both species dispersal distance and dispersal rate. We showed that strong disturbance promotes species with high dispersal abilities, while low local adult survival and habitat availability select against them. Spatial autocorrelation favors species with higher dispersal ability when adult survival and disturbance rate are low, and selects against them in the opposite situation. Interestingly, several dispersal strategies coexist when disturbance and adult survival act in opposition, as for example when strong disturbance regime favors species with high dispersal abilities while low adult survival selects species with low dispersal. Our results unify apparently contradictory previous results and demonstrate that spatial structure, disturbance and adult survival determine the success and diversity of coexisting dispersal strategies in competing metacommunities