ABSTRACT
The emergence of illegal drug use in the last two decades in the four countries studied has been related to different policy responses. Mostly in the 1990s, many new activities, professional doctrines and specific policies have been developed. Starting from the comparative research on Swedish and British drug policies the authors discovered that the “distinction between ‘liberal’ and ‘restrictive’ perspectives towards drugs is of considerable use when considering attitudes towards drugs”. In making hypotheses about the importance of the drug-related attitudes and their relations to the institutional output we do not say much about the hypothesized causality. The questionnaire used in our research included—besides many questions on organizations, their characteristics and activities—eight statements, which were expressing some typical opinions about the problem of illegal drugs. The global differences in time of founding between permissive and restrictive organizations could be also due to a specific interaction between countries, attitudes and times of founding of organizations.
