Youth Organisation And Union Of Students File Complaints With Parliamentary Ombudsman

Students at the Petolahti upper secondary school located in the communities of Maalahti and Korsnas were tested for drugs at the Maalahti health centre in Ostrobothnia two weeks ago. Among the 135 students, eleven over the age of 18 refused, and three were tested anonymously.

The tests were carried out in order to detect the presence of hashish or signs of the use of sedatives. All the results came back negative.

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Christie Calls for Rational Debate - Opposes Taboos

At a seminar at the auditorium of the Finnish Parliament on Thursday, the world-renowned Norwegian criminologist Professor Nils Christie told his audience of more than 100 people that the war against illegal drugs cannot be won, and that it is therefore better to concentrate on reducing the harm caused by the drugs.

Christie's message did not come as a surprise to the listeners. About two decades ago he and Finnish sociologist Kettil Bruun wrote about these same ideas in a book entitled Den gode fiende: narkotikapolitikk i Norden ("The Good Enemy: Drug Policy in the Nordic Countries").

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Study Says One in Eight Finns Have Used a Drug Sometime in Their Lives

A study released by the Development and Research Centre for Welfare and Health (STAKES) reveals that 12% of Finns have used an illegal drug at some time in their lives. Ten years ago the corresponding figure was five percent.

The increase in drug experimentation has been greatest among young adults aged 20 - 29. One in three men and one in four women in that age group have tried cannabis.

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Finnish Green MEPs sign appeal for review of UN Conventions on Drugs

News that the Finnish Green Members of the European Parliament Heidi Hautala and the other Finnish Green MEP Matti Wuori are among the signatories of an international appeal calling for a revision of the United Nations Conventions on Drugs has sparked intense reactions in a political climate already heated up by the upcoming elections.

The focus of the appeal is the perception that drug policy based on prohibitions and criminal sanctions has been a worldwide failure.

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KERAVA, Finland - Going by the numbers, Antti Syvajarvi is a loser. He is a prison inmate in Finland - the country that jails fewer of its citizens than any other in the European Union.

Still, he counts himself fortunate.

"If I have to be a prisoner," he said, "I'm happy I'm one in Finland because I trust the Finnish system."

So, evidently, do law-abiding Finns, even though their system is Europe's most lenient and would probably be the object of soft-on-criminals derision in many societies outside of the Nordic countries.

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Many experts see drugs seen as a convenient scapegoat to hide political shortcomings

Have those people in London gone crazy? In May more than 20,000 marched in London calling for the legalisation of cannabis. Several similar demonstrations have been held in Britain in recent years.

A powerful popular movement has arisen in the country, calling for a more liberal drug policy. The quality newspaper, The Independent on Sunday, backs the legalisation of cannabis, and has organised demonstrations itself. The respected economic journal The Economist would allow the use and sale of all drugs.

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Many of today's illegal drugs were used in Finland well before the hippie era - the country was full of them during the war

The day is March 18, 1944.

A Finnish ski patrol in the terrain of Kantalahti in Finnish Lapland is on the third day of its mission behind enemy lines when the group is ambushed by Soviet forces at the foot of Kaitatunturi fell. During an intense firefight, the men manage to slip past the enemy who are trying to encircle them.

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The Finnish Parliament passed prohibition a number of times - in the years 1907, 1909, 1911, and 1914. Each time the Czar rejected it.

Finland became independent in 1917, and a new law on prohibition came into effect on June 1, 1919. It was repealed nearly 13 years later on the 5th of April 1932 at 10:00 AM. The exact time is easy to remember as a countdown: 5-4-3-2-1-0. The repeal of prohibition came after an advisory referendum showed extensive public dissatisfaction with its consequences.

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Prohibition Repealed 70 Years Ago

A typical scene in a Helsinki restaurant during the prohibition era looked superficially serene.

Customers would sit at their tables sipping cup after cup of tea. The tables also had bowls of crisp bread which nobody ate. Whenever a customer would leave the restaurant, the bread would be moved to another table, where the customers also ignored it. No, the people of Helsinki at the time were not so fond of tea that they would have bothered to go to a restaurant and drink nothing else. The cups contained what was known as "hard tea" - half tea, half pure alcohol. The crisp bread was a bluff, used to ward off the sobriety monitors, or "breath sniffers".

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Hashish Sold Among Friends Sometimes At Cost Price

A total of 39 young people from southern Helsinki were sitting in a very crowded dock at Helsinki District Court on Thursday facing charges of distributing and using cannabis. Most of the defendants were between the ages of 17 and 22.

The group have become known in the Finnish media as the "Eira Mafia", named according to the Eira district of Helsinki where many of them live. However, the image that the kids in the courtroom projected is quite far removed from any Mafia stereotypes.

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Tests Acceptable Only Under Special Circumstances

A working group of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health does not favour the establishment of widespread routine drug testing at Finnish workplaces.

According to a report submitted on Wednesday, drug tests would only be acceptable in special circumstances related to a specific task, to work safety, or to a special need for an intoxicant-free working environment.

The working group feels that testing should not be used as a means of assessing an employee's overall trustworthiness.

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For at least the last 20 years, drunk driving in Canada has been attacked with a combination of public education, spot checks, and increased criminal punishments, including imprisonment. Over the same period, drunk driving has substantially decreased. It's probable most Canadians assume tougher punishments were crucial to that happy result, and even tougher punishments will reduce drunk driving even further.

Finland's experience with drunk driving strongly suggests that assumption is wrong.

Like all the Nordic countries, Finland has long had serious problems with alcohol abuse. The traditional Finnish response relied heavily on criminal law. Drunk driving, in particular, was severely punished: In the late 1960s, more than 80 per cent of convicted drunk drivers were given prison sentences.

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In a classroom thick with wigs, sinks and barber chairs, a man sprays water through a woman's sudsy hair and works his fingers carefully to rinse the shampoo. Standing in front of a large mirror, another man brushes and sprays a woman's hair. Two others discuss styling techniques. It could be a scene from any community college, but for the bars on the windows.

This is Hameenlinna Central Prison, near Helsinki. The stylist working at the mirror is a convicted murderer. The man washing hair is a drug trafficker. Two of the three women are also prisoners; the other is a professional hairstylist hired to teach the class. There are no guards.

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Four Young Users Die During One Year

Four young Finns are reported to have died of the combined effects of the drug ecstasy and pharmaceutical anti-depressants in the past year. There are no previous reports of such deaths in Finland, or elsewhere. Erkki Vuori, Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Helsinki, wrote in the journal Mediuutiset recently that no such cases have been reported in the international literature. Experts say that the combined use of ecstasy and anti-depressants could be a very Finnish phenomenon.

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Members Of Gang And Customers Are From Well-to-do Families

Police in Helsinki have uncovered a drug distribution network mainly comprising young people aged 18 and 19. According to a television news report on Thursday, the group mainly sold cannabis, as well as a small amount of ecstasy.

According to Finland's fourth national television network, TV-Nelonen, the group is one of the most extensive drug sales networks uncovered in Finland.

Police have remanded four main suspects in custody. Each of the suspects were reported to have about 20 dealers working for them.

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EU Drug Agency Issues Report

After a period of growing consumption, the increase in the use of heroin is slowing down in most member states of the European Union. However, according to the annual report of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the use of heroin continues to rise in Finland. The report also points out that the intravenous use of drugs is reflected in an alarming increase in HIV infections in this country.

Published in Brussels on Tuesday, the EMCDDA report indicates that Finnish trends in the use of illegal drugs would seem to be following those of the rest of Europe with a delay of a few years.

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No Evidence To Support Benefits Of Drug Testing

A working group set up by Labquality, an independent quality control organisation for clinical laboratories, has found that work place drug tests are very unreliable, yielding many false positive results. According to the working group, the results of tests need to be verified, lest a person getting a positive result be falsely labelled a drug abuser.

The working group presented a set of recommendations for how drug tests should be conducted, pointing out that if they are not done right, the tests are useless. According to the chairman of the working group, Dr. Timo Seppala, consideration should be given to the initiation of drug tests, because there is no scientific evidence that drug testing offers any real benefits.

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Drug Use Still Twice As Prevalent As In Early 1990s

There are signs that the increase in the use of illegal drugs in Finland is reaching a plateau. According to a study by STAKES, the National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health, the sharp increase in the use of illegal drugs in the 1990s had stopped between the years 1998 and 2000.

The figures are from a STAKES population survey.

According to the study which was released on Wednesday, one in ten Finns admitted to having used or experimented with some illegal drug at least once. Two percent said that they had used an illegal drug during the past year. The results are similar to those in the previous study from 1998.

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Perspective

This writer and Jenna and Barbara Bush, the twin daughters of President George W. Bush, have a common problem, namely the purchase of alcoholic beverages in the great state of Texas. The twins crossed the news threshold in embarrassing fashion this week when Jenna, 19, allegedly attempted to use someone else's ID card in order to obtain a drink in a fashionable watering-hole in Austin, the state capital. Barbara had meanwhile somehow managed to get served, and she was cited for possession of alcohol by a minor.

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Director-General Taipale Apologises At Press Conference

Vappu Taipale, the Director-General of STAKES, the National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health, says that she "deeply regrets" press statements that she made last week concerning her experiments with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as a student.

Taipale issued a statement and held a press conference on the issue on Monday. At her press conference Taipale said that she wanted to express remorse and apologise to everyone who had been hurt by what she had said and whose work she had made more difficult. Taipale said that in recent days she had been contacted by many people working in connection with the drug problem.

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