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How will the Nordic countries adapt their drug policies in a new situation when several countries all over the world are questioning ‘the war on drugs’ and orient themselves in the direction of decriminalization and legalization?
The Nordic project on the possible change in drug policies tries to answer, or at least illuminate, different questions, such as:
- What signs are there of changing drug policies in the direction of the reduced use of penal law?
- What arguments are used in the public discourse to challenge earlier policies?
- What obstacles are there to change in terms of justifications, fears and actors?
The analyses from the five Nordic countries show that the debate has opened up, that the failure of earlier policies is increasingly being pointed out and that the younger generations are becoming more critical to the zero-tolerance policy. At the same time, making a retreat is not that easy. Beliefs, ideologies and vested interests can be quite resistant. The Nordic countries stand at a crossroads, but what new roads will be taken is far from clear.
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What is day-to-day life like for people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities who live in group homes? How do they express their desires and wishes? How do care workers think about them and treat them? Do they have basic rights to activities most of us take for granted: activities like sociability, sexuality, and moral affirmation?
Narrowed Lives is an illuminating portrait of what life is like in Finnish group homes where adults who have profound intellectual and multiple disabilities live their lives. Based upon ethnographic data, it documents how care workers strive to guarantee individuality and dignity against a backdrop of scarce resources and misguided policies. This book argues that the lives of people with profound disabilities need not be determined by their impairments. It calls for a re-evaluation of disability policy so that its underlying conviction of people with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities as equally valuable fellow humans would materialise in practice.
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