General Discussion

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217540135

plus

Nils Bejerot was an asshole on many fronts, one of worst of the influential Swedes.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100217540135#post24

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nils_Bejerot

Nils Johan Artur Bejerot (September 21, 1921 – November 29, 1988) was a Swedish psychiatrist and criminologist best known for his work on drug abuse and for coining the phrase Stockholm syndrome. Bejerot was one of the top drug abuse researchers in Sweden. His view that drug abuse was a criminal matter and that drug use should have severe penalties was highly influential in Sweden and in other countries. He believed that the cure for drug addiction was to make drugs unavailable and socially unacceptable. He also advocated the idea that drug abuse could transition from being a symptom to a disease in itself.

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Before Bejerot began to participate in the debate on drugs in 1965, it was the dominant view in Sweden that drug abuse was a private health problem and that law enforcement measures should be aimed at drug dealers. Before 1968, the maximum offence for a grave drug crime was one year in prison. Bejerot objected to this and stressed the importance of measures against the demand for drugs, against users, and their importance in the spread of addiction to new addicts. Bejerot did not accept unemployment and poor private economy as explanations for increased use of illegal drugs. He pointed out that alcohol abuse in the 1930s was comparatively limited in Sweden, despite high unemployment and economic depression.

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Berejot also strongly advocated for strict anti-drug laws. In 1965 Bejerot started to engage in the Swedish debate on drug abuse, encouraging tough action against the new and rapidly growing problem. He followed closely a rather clumsy experiment with legal prescription of heroin, amphetamine, etc. to drug addicts, studies that formed the basis for his thesis on the epidemic drug spread. Bejerot claimed that the program should increase the number of drug addicts and showed through counting of injection marks that the number of drug addicts in Stockholm continued to grow fast during the experiment. The program was stopped in 1968. From 1968 and onward, the difference between the epidemic type, the therapeutic type and the endemic type of drug abuse was a repeated issue in Bejerot's writing and lectures.

In 1969, Bejerot became one of the founders of the Association for a Drug-Free Society (RNS), which played - and still plays - an important role in shaping Swedish drug policies. RNS don't accept any of the state grants which are available. Bejerot warned of the consequences of an ‘epidemic addiction’, prompted by young, psychologically and socially unstable persons who, usually after direct personal initiation from another drug abuser, begin to use socially nonaccepted, intoxicating drugs to gain euphoria. In 1972, Bejerots' reports were used as one of the reasons for increasing the maximum penalty for grave drug offences in Sweden to 10 years in prison. In 1974 he was called to testify as one of 21 scientific experts on marijuana for a subcommittee of the United States Senate on the marijuana-hashish epidemic and its impact on United States security.

He advocated zero tolerance for illegal use and possession of drugs, including all drugs not covered by prescription, something that today is law in Sweden. In the early 1980s, he became one of the "Top 10 opinion molders" in Sweden for this. Bejerot is by UNODC and many others recognized as founder of the Swedish strategy against recreational use of drugs. His demand for zero tolerance as a drug policy was for a long time seen as extreme, but during the late 1970s opinion changed. He is without doubt the person most responsible for changing the Swedish drug policy in a restrictive direction something that made him a controversial person, both before and after his death. Many people considered Bejerot as a good humanist advocating a viable policy against narcotics and Robert DuPont considers him "the hero of the Swedish drug abuse story." Others view this as a reactionary hindering of new treatment practices against drug abuse.