Harm reduction eller nollvision? : En kvalitativ studie om hur professionella inom människobehandlande organisationer resonerar kring narkotikapolitiska inriktningar

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study was to gain knowledge regarding how professionals working in human service organizations reasons around drug policy, more specifically harm reduction and zero tolerance. The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews with two social workers who work towards drug addicts in a municipal human service organization and a qualitative document analysis of discussion articles, written by professionals such as doctors, social workers, therapists and politicians. I applied both the theory of accounts and institutional organization theory to analyze the collected data as well as to gain further understanding of the subject I chose to research. The study shows that professionals in human service organizations reasons in many ways regarding drug policy, although it is easy to identify three positions; the first two ones consisting of professionals whom are either pro harm reduction or zero tolerance whereas the third one consists of professionals observing both positive and negative aspects of both drug policies. Furthermore, the conclusion of the analysis showed that the professionals to a large extent used the linguistic technique “appeal to loyalties” to justify their reasoning regarding drug policy by stressing their experience and what is best for the misusing clients as important arguments. Although the participating professionals are divergent, in the sense that they work for different organizations and have various task assignments it was hard to identify differences in which account they used to either excuse or justify their reasoning concerning harm reduction and zero tolerance.