ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 discusses the social constructions of people who use drugs in Sweden that provide a discursive backdrop to Swedish prohibitionist rhetoric, legislation, and policy. This chapter emphasises that much of this social construction stems from an ‘addiction-as-disease’ model of understanding, which casts people who use drugs and people with drug dependencies as simultaneously sick and infantilised, whilst being additionally dangerous, deviant, and criminal. Augmenting this model of understanding is a peculiarly Swedish perception of drug use itself as a disease, spread from individual to individual by people who use drugs. The chapter critiques and deconstructs these models of understanding
