Legislating thresholds for drug trafficking: A policy development case study from New South Wales, Australia

Representations of alcohol and drug use in the Finnish reform of social and health care service users' rights

BACKGROUND

A growing body of research has analysed the representations of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) in policy-making, but few studies have focused on the representations reproduced in law-making processes, especially in the context of the regulation of the rights of social and health care service users. This study examined what kind of representations of AOD use are reproduced in the legislative reform of social and health care service users' rights in Finland. The purpose of the reform is to strengthen social and health care service users' rights to self-determination and to reduce the use of restrictive measures.

METHODS

As its data, the study used a draft of the bill and stakeholder opinions regarding the reform. 'What's the problem represented to be?' approach as a methodological framework.

RESULTS

The study discovered three AOD-related discourses: the Control, Welfare, and Rights and Legality discourses. The Control discourse represented people who use AOD as risky individuals and called for ways to manage risks in treatment situations. The Welfare discourse portrayed people who use AOD as a vulnerable group whose problems should be addressed by the welfare system. The Rights and Legality discourse represented the vague legal definitions of AOD use as the main regulatory problem. The discourses differed in terms of their definitions of self-determination.

CONCLUSIONS

The study illustrated how the right to self-determination as a legal concept is contested and can be interpreted in different ways depending on the representations of AOD use. The differing representations highlight the tensions involved in improving the rights of people who use AOD.

Drug supply indicators: Pitfalls and possibilities for improvements to assist comparative analysis

Interventions to tackle the supply of drugs are seen as standard components of illicit drug policies. Therefore drug market-related administrative data, such as seizures, price, purity and drug-related offending, are used in most countries for policy monitoring and assessment of the drug situation. International agencies, such as the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) and the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, also monitor and report on the drug situation cross-nationally and therefore seek to collect and make available key data in a uniform manner from the countries they cover. However, these data are not primarily collected for this purpose, which makes interpretation and comparative analysis difficult. Examples of limitations of these data sources include: the extent to which they reflect operational priorities rather than market changes; question marks over the robustness of and consistency in data collection methods, and issues around the timeliness of data availability. Such problems are compounded by cultural, social and contextual differences between countries. Making sense of such data is therefore challenging and extreme care needs to be taken using it. Nevertheless, these data provide an important window on a hidden area, so improving the quality of the data collected and expanding its scope should be a priority for those seeking to understand or monitor drug markets and supply reduction. In addition to highlighting some of the potential pitfalls in using supply indicators for comparative analysis, this paper presents a selection of options for improvements based on the current EMCDDA programme of work to improve their supply-related monitoring and analysis. The conceptual framework developed to steer this work may have wider application. Adopting this approach has the potential to provide a richer picture of drug markets, at both national and international levels, and make it easier to compare data between countries.

Ideation, social construction and drug policy: A scoping review

Within drug policy scholarship there is a growing body of literature applying ideational and social constructionist approaches to address the complexity of drug policy making and the apparent failure of the evidence-based policy paradigm to free the process from controversy and contestation. Ideational approaches are concerned with the roles played by ideas and beliefs in policy making, while social construction explores the way policy problems are constructed, and agendas are set and delineated by dominant frames and narratives. Interest in these approaches has developed over the last two decades, but has rapidly gained momentum over the last five years. There has been limited reflection on the state of the field, therefore it is timely to conduct a review of the literature to assess the value of these approaches, capture emerging themes and issues, and identify gaps in the literature to support future research directions. Using the Arksey and O'Malley framework, a scoping review was conducted to survey the breadth of the field. Following database and hand searching, 48 studies from 1996 to 2016 were selected for inclusion in the review. A narrative synthesis was undertaken and the literature was grouped into five broad theoretical approaches: ideational policy theory, problem construction, narratives and frames (including media analysis), construction of target populations, and policy transfer and mobilities. The majority of the studies are focused on single countries and drug policy issues, with few studies undertaking comparative work or reflecting on general theoretical developments in the literature. This study found that the Arksey and O'Malley framework was effective in capturing a potentially diverse field of literature and demonstrates the importance of ideational and social constructionist approaches to drug policy scholarship. Further research is required to achieve expanded geographic coverage, test policy making models and undertake comparative work.