About 35 years ago the WHO advocated that countries with injecting drug users should introduce the so-called needle exchange programs (NEP) to curb the spread of infection by blood-borne diseases. In Sweden the first NEP started 1985 in Lund, but the program was extremely controversial in a country with such a restrictive drug policy like Sweden. The study you are about to read shall process this controversy, when a NEP opened in Stockholm, by analyzing the articles published in the newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet. By using discourse analysis as a processing tool we’ll try to see the difference between the two chosen newspapers. We will identify and analyze the different participant’s, such as doctors, politicians, user associations and media, arguments in the needle exchange issue.   Our results show that the liberal DN articles were supportive of the NEP and that they considered it to be an infectious disease control issue. The liberal conservative newspaper SvD had a different view of the issue and considered NEP to be a question about drug policy. Even after the decision was made the city had problems to find suitable premises for the NEP to operate from.

The diploma thesis deals with the social stigma of injecting users of illegal addictive substances, specifically it deals with the social stigmas that may occur in connection with the use of addictive substances. Social stigma can result in barriers to the use of social services by injecting drug users. The diploma thesis deals with the obstacles that injecting users of illegal addictive substances encounter when using social services. The work tries to identify, map, and describe these obstacles. The theoretical part of the thesis describes the topic of the social environment, addictive substances, addiction, methods of working with users of addictive substances and obstacles associated with the use of social services and other services. The main chapters deal with theoretical topics related to the topic and title of the diploma thesis. The subchapters then elaborate the main topics in more detail. The empirical part of the work was realized through a qualitative survey, specifically through semi-structured interviews. The research sample was a set of contact center clients in the Ústí Region. The main goal of this work is to identify and describe the obstacles that injecting users of illegal addictive substances encounter when using social services. The other sub-objectives were as follows: to...