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Other conclusions can be drawn on Swedish drug policy than Ted Goldberg does in his debate article on October 10 in SvD. Several places in the EMCDDA 2020 report that Goldberg refers to describe that it is difficult to compare countries with each other because drug-related deaths are calculated in very different ways. Drug-related death in an HIV-infected person is classified as drug-related in Sweden, while in Portugal it is classified as HIV-related. Therefore, you get more reliable information by examining changes over time in the same country. The UK has a more permissive drug policy than Sweden, but it does not appear to protect drug-related mortality. But based on the report’s reasoning, this could be because the UK reported these deaths in a different way than Sweden.
In the EMCDDA report, one of the figures (page 70, figure 38) shows how drug-related mortality varied between 2000 and 2018 in different countries. As Goldberg writes, the highest drug-related mortality was reported in Sweden (81.5 per million population), but not reported to have decreased since 2016. Based on the figure, it can be concluded that Swedish addiction doctors prescribe very few prescriptions for methadone or buprenorphine substitution therapy for very few drug addicts and therefore die when they use illegal drugs instead. An alternative conclusion is that syringe exchange programs and substitution treatment have increased mortality here. In Sweden, there is a strong temporary connection between a generous prescription for opiates that began in 2006 and a dramatic increase in the number of deaths from these drugs in the body.
