de Boer, Rasmus Normann

Frederiksen, Asgar Bo

Rau-Andersen, Philip Georg

In recent years, Denmark has seen an increase in the consumption of psychoactive substances within the population. As a response, the Municipality of Copenhagen has contended this through police action, attempting to impound these substances throughout the capital - but with little to no success.Since the Portuguese drug reforms in 2001, the approach has been different as these reforms re-sulted in a decriminalization of psychoactive substances within the country. Portugal has, with its approach, managed to pull itself out of a heroin epidemic. In addition, they have notable im-provements to drug related, societal problems. This raises the question:What underlying social mechanisms exist for drug consumption, and what is the best way to treat addicted consumers of psychoactive substances?To answer this, we will use a critical theoretical perspective to analyze the lifeworld of consumers of psychoactive substances in Denmark and Portugal respectively. This will be done with the help of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition and will be accommodated with a theoretical understand-ing of addiction in a physical sense. Our analysis has helped us reach the following conclusion:In Denmark, consumers of psychoactive substances are, to a relatively large extent, excluded from society. This is problematic since the prerequisite of drug addiction and abuse usually has roots in an individual’s deeper, underlying issues. Portugal’s approach statistically works due to the fact that they acknowledge the individuals as patients and not criminals. This means that they work to recover the self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem of the consumers to once again inte-grate them in society.<br/

Decriminalization of psychoactive substances - a study on the exclusion of consumers of psychoactive substances

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Roskilde Universitet