[3838]

i was in oslo & amsterdam recently and the difference in junkie on the street levels was staggering - much much higher in oslo where drug laws are harsher.

i imagine this is a reasonable factor in amounts of prisoners in the two countries, though haven't checked data on percentage of prisoners who are heroin addicts.

[vidarh]

Norway lags even continental Europe by 20 years or more when it comes to the drug debate, I'm afraid. It's the "dark side" of Scandinavian culture that remnants of protestant piety have successfully dominated our attitudes to drugs and alcohol in a very damaging way, where, while on one hand "everyone" acknowledges drug abuse as an illness that people needs help to combat, there is still very much an air of judgement over attitudes to junkies that makes it very hard to get support for reform of drug laws.

[3838]

it was a huge problem in NL that brought about a change there - i'd say the solution was born out of need rather than being a moral thing

some more info:

http://amsterdamgang.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/drugs-on-the-h...

[Skinney]

The drug policies in Norway is all wrong, Oslo is the european capitol of overdoses, and yet most politicians fail to face reality :/

[3838]

yeah i saw one guy overdosed when i was there - some countries are providing police and even addicts family members with Anti-Overdose Drugs

seems they can be given as a nasal spray so safer than injections - when people are not medically trained

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/nyregion/anti-overdose-dru...

[haakon]

In Bergen, Norway, they have just started handing out the nasal spray to heroin addicts. We have a huge overdose problem here and I hope this helps.

[3838]

thats encouraging to hear - it seems like huge problems in the US are starting to force a change towards harm reduction, i think it's vermont where it's really out of control and they're changing laws a little bit, for example, if an addict calls an ambulance for someone who overdosed, then they won't be arrested or charged for drug offences

[tallanvor]

I have no idea what crimes the Oslo police are actually focusing on, but drugs seem to be on the absolute bottom of their list. It would be one thing if they didn't have the resources to respond to every call about a witnessed drug deal, but they won't even send someone out to collect the drugs when they're told where the dealers are hiding them! At least they could get some of the drugs off the streets that way.

[mrborgen]

Actually, they do focus on this from time to time, busting a lot of dealers and drug addicts. This normally happens when the area they dealers/addicts occupy becomes too annoying for the public.

However, it doesn't solve anything. It just spreads the drug addicts and dealers around the city for a while, making drugs available everywhere instead of just around the "junkie area".

And then when the police stops busting people, a new "junkie area" appears.

Until it all repeats again..

[3838]

part of how that was tackled in holland was that if an addict was arrested they were offered a choice between being charged or going into treatment - and they may have also been banned from the junkie area (normally people are arrested if they violate this kind of ban)

[mrborgen]

That sounds like a very good practice. Much better than here. However, there aren't enough political will to do something like that here.. The bars for getting into treatment, especially with "replacement drugs" are way to high.

[3838]

some parts of the UK had problems with dealers scaring away litter collectors and road repair crews - they were hiding drugs in cracks in the road and empty coke cans in the street

end result was bad roads and lots of rubbish in those neighbourhoods

[unhammer]

So the reason the Netherlands has more prisoners is because in Oslo junkies live on the streets? I don't quite follow the reasoning.

[gahahaha]

The war on drugs is still going on in Oslo, and the human cost is evident in the human misery on the streets (and filling up the prisons). The dutch have reached a more enlightened stage in the fight against drugs, and it shows.

[3838]

i'm not sure they live on the streets or not - but i think it's safe to say that the heroin problem is holland is being dealt with and in norway it's out of control - last figures i saw were 17k dutch addicts with 12k in treatment, no idea how norway stacks up though

that article says that the dutch want to close 19 prisons due to lack of prisoners, but there are not enough prisons in norway

[unhammer]

My point was: The fact that the Netherlands has too many prisons and Norway too few compared to prison population does not entail that the amounts of prisoners are wildly different. In fact, they're pretty much the same. Norway just hasn't built as many prisons as the Netherlands.

Whether the difference in prison saturation is related to their drug policy is a completely different question. (In any case, it seems Norway is doing an about-turn wrt. rehabilitation: http://theforeigner.no/pages/columns/a-forthcoming-change-in... )

[3838]

fair enough - i guess i wanted to tell people about my recent observation.