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The Center Party and the Liberal Party have completely different views on what a future Norwegian drug policy should look like. Here the drug addict “Calle” (41) will smoke heroin in a separate inhalation room which is also called the heroin smoking room in Oslo. Photo: Heiko Junge / NTB
The Center Party warns against the liberalization of drug policy and wants to sharpen drug fines for the top earners. The party listens to professional advice, responds the Liberal Party.
– With an income-based fine, it will really hurt wealthy financiers to use cocaine, so we get rid of the culture that was outlined in the ‘Exit’ series, Torleik Svelle, leader of Senterungdommen, tells NTB.
In the NRK series “Exit”, we meet four fictional characters from a financial environment, where drug abuse is part of everyday life.
– An income-based ticket means we can do more for the affluent who use drugs at parties. We know this is a big problem today, and that many get away cheaply, says Svelle.
He is a member of the Sp programs committee, which this week presented a draft of a new party program.
– Romanticization
Implementing a drug reform that goes from punishing addicts to helping them is enshrined in the Granavolden platform presented by the four bourgeois parties last year.
This winter, the Drug Reform Committee proposed shifting responsibility for societal reactions to substance abuse from the justice sector to the health service and decriminalizing the use and possession of drugs for personal use.
– I experience that especially at youth parties like Unge Venstre there is a form of drug romance. They applaud the liberal proposal from the drug reform committee that one should be free to carry a full bag of drugs, Svelle says.
– Listen to professional advice
A drug reform that shifts the focus from punishment to aid was one of the Liberal Party’s most important advances in government negotiations.
– We support the recommendations of the drug reform committee, as well as the Prosecutor General and the Norwegian Health Directorate. Svelle certainly thinks the two are “applauding the drug romance,” Unge Venstre frontman Sondre Hansmark tells NTB.
He is a member of the party’s program committee and believes that no one should take Sp’s proposal seriously.
– We heard a 416-page expert report with up-to-date research and experiences, while Svelle bases his point of view on an entertainment series on television, says Hansmark of Svelle’s “Exit” example.
– You probably thought the topic was boring to read. But if you had read it, you would have realized that there is nothing that punishes people for quitting drugs.
Disagree on suggestions
According to the program proposal, Sp “will maintain the prohibition of the use, possession and purchase of drugs in Norwegian law and related criminal provisions.”
– Those who are older than 18 years and are taken with drugs, will be fined based on income. Those who are addicted to drugs and have drug-related disease problems should be closely followed by the health service, writes a majority of ten on the committee.
Svelle believes the proposal takes more into account than the drug reform committee managed to take. His view is that the drug reform committee allows people to bring large doses of users with them, at the same time that they want to take away the option of sanction from society.
– We are able to take into account young people who are struggling, punish people who use drugs at parties in a more just way and take care of people who have serious health problems related to drug abuse, says Svelle.
A dissent from a committee member states that Sp wants “the use, possession and purchase of drugs to continue to be illegal, but eliminated from the penal code so that the monitoring implies help and not punishment.”
