Substitutionsbehandling – Statlig drog eller behandling? : En kvalitativ studie av substitutionsdebatten i svensk press

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study was to illustrate viewpoints and arguments in debate articles in Swedish evening – and daily press about opioid substitution therapy the past 12 years. We think that it’s relevant to elucidate the substitution debate, because the vision on drug abuse and it’s causes influence which interventions and method of treatments that are used. And social workers are affected by the debate as in political decisions and the dependants expectations on the drug-care. We have chosen four daily newspapers and two evening newspapers that together reach a big population in the country and cover a big geographical area. We wanted to analyze the contents in the debate articles so we putted together qualitative data-analyze and qualitative contents-analyze and called it qualitative text- and contents analyze. With the method we could figure out three perspectives from the debate articles that we have choose to call the control perspective, the caring perspective and the justice perspective. Each one of these perspectives has their own viewpoint on opioid substitution therapy and we found that the debaters are using arguments for their viewpoint to criticize the others viewpoints. We found that the control perspective has a collection of arguments where the debaters according to our interpretation are saying that substitution patients is a deviance and should be controlled and navigated to be reconverted to a normal life. These arguments shows that the control perspective has a viewpoint that they want to reduce the harmfulness in the community. The viewpoint for the caring perspective according to our interpretation is that they want to reduce the harmfulness for the individual with the arguments that the heroine patients isn’t getting the help they are in need of, and many patients are dying in the waiting for a lifesaving caring. From the arguments that a moral view often lay to the ground how heroine abusers are getting stigmatized and treated in health-care, has the justice perspective according to our interpretation a viewpoint that the substitution patients have rights to get equal qualified caring as the other patient groups.