Bejerot On Factors That Increase The Risk of Abuse
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.
Nils Bejerot stressed five main factors that cause increased risk of an individual of becoming a drug abuser:
- Availability of the addictive substance
- Money to acquire the substance
- Time to use the substance
- Example of use of the substance in the immediate environment
- A permissive ideology in relation to the use of the substance.
Bejerot advanced the hypothesis that when addiction supervenes it is no longer a symptom but a morbid condition of its own. In the abuse stage one can willfully control their consumption and intoxicating themselves at will, but eventually - depending the product's addictive qualities, the dosage, the intensity of the abuse, individual factors etc. - the drug abuse can turn into drug dependency, the drug use receive the strength of an instinct. Then its development will not be affected by removal of the initiating factors, the drug dependency has the strength and character of a natural drive, even though it is artificially-induced.
He compared addiction with a very deep love, writing that addiction is "an emotional fixation (sentiment) acquired through learning, which intermittently or continually expresses itself in purposeful, stereotyped behavior with the character and force of a natural drive, aiming at a specific pleasure or the avoidance of a specific discomfort."
This would however not mean that drug addiction was impossible to treat. The abuse was learned, hence it is also possible to relearn, how to live without drugs, and treatment of drug addicts should have a drug-free goal, differing with others who aimed at reduction of adverse effects, also known as harm reduction. Bejerot thus criticized programs of long methadone treatment of opiate users in programs that were not aimed at drug freedom.
Read more about this topic: Nils Bejerot
Famous quotes containing the words factors, increase, risk and/or abuse:
“Girls tend to attribute their failures to factors such as lack of ability, while boys tend to attribute failure to specific factors, including teachers’ attitudes. Moreover, girls avoid situations in which failure is likely, whereas boys approach such situations as a challenge, indicating that failure differentially affects self-esteem.”
—Michael Lewis (late–20th-century)
“I have an intense personal interest in making the use of American capital in the development of China an instrument for the promotion of the welfare of China, and an increase in her material prosperity without entanglements or creating embarrassment affecting the growth of her independent political power, and the preservation of her territorial integrity.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“Hence, the less government we have, the better,—the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)