Cannabis, ett mångfacetterat ämne : En kvalitativ studie av hur cannabis och brukare därav beskrivs i Aftonbladet

Sammanfattning: The purpose of the study is to create an understanding for how one of Sweden’s biggest newspapers Aftonbladet (Aftonbladet 2019a) describes cannabis. In a time when the strict Swedish drug policy meets the more drug liberal political tendencies that is seen in the world. The study is based on 79 articles in Aftonbladet May 2018 to March 2019 that includes the word cannabis. Most of the articles are news reports, a few are debate articles and the rest is unspecified. A discourse analysis was used to examine the articles. The result shows that the most common discourse was cannabis as something illegal. This means that the focus point in the articles was on people getting arrested, police and customs making big drug confiscations and other things defining cannabis as something illegal. This proves what earlier studies has shown about what media chooses to write about. And that is that media usually writes about what the current policy says - in Sweden we still have a zero-tolerance policy. But a lot of articles also showed a more liberal way of looking at cannabis. The results of the study are important since social workers ideas about a phenomenon can be shaped by the images given to us by the media. These ideas can influence social workers attitudes towards people who use cannabis.