The purpose of this study is to explore professional drug addiction care workers’ attitudes towards harm reduction interventions. The data collection was conducted through digital survey mailed to mangers and staff. In total 73 individuals choose to answer the survey. The biopsychosocial perspective and stigmatization theory were used to theoretically reflect on the results. Most respondents reported positive attitudes towards maintenance treatment, needle exchange programs and overdose prevention with naloxone. The result also shows that the majority of respondents’ have a negative attitude towards injection rooms and decriminalization of drugs for personal use. Moreover, staff with higher education reported more positive attitudes towards maintenance treatment, needle exchange, injection rooms and decriminalization of drugs for personal use. In conclusion, it is important to recognize and spread new developments and evidence-based research regarding harm reduction and decriminalization of narcotics drugs. Based on the respondents’ negative attitudes towards implement injection rooms and decriminalize drugs for personal use, but also the improvement of staffs’ attitudes that present study found it is supposed that neglecting prohibition and showing zero tolerance towards personal use will probably disappear in the future even in Sweden.

The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction reports that drug-related deaths have almost tripled in Sweden between year 2006 and 2015. The aim of this study is to elucidate in which ways drug-related mortality is produced and conceptualized as a problem within policy discourse by critically analyzing The National Board of Health and Welfare’s policy proposal “Nationellt utvecklingsarbete för att motverka narkotikarelaterad dödlighet” (2017). Using Bacchi’s poststructural approach to policy analysis “What’s the problem represented to be?”, two problem representations are identified, namely that drug-related mortality is conceptualized as a problem with drugs and drug use in general as well as a problem due to lack of knowledge and information. This is based on underlying assumptions that all illegal drug use is hazardous and that the solution to the drug problem can be obtained by objective knowledge production thus leaving both the practice of gaining knowledge as well as current Swedish drug laws unproblematized. The effects are, to name a few, that proposed policies mainly targets “all people who use drugs” with a focus on providing “more of the same” which in extension overrides the group of high-risk drug users along with a structural understanding of drug-related mortality.