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Finland Services for Substance Abusers
The Welfare for Intoxicant Abusers Act of 1985 dealt
mainly
with alcoholism, as it was the only serious problem of
substance
abuse in Finland in the late 1980s. Finnish society had
traditionally not seen alcohol as a part of daily life,
but
rather as something consumed on special occasions and then
to the
point of intoxication. Medical evidence of this harmful
habit was
that the Finnish incidence of death by acute alcohol
poisoning
was seven times that of Sweden and twenty times that of
Denmark.
Because of its troubled relationship with alcohol, the
country
enforced prohibition from 1919 to 1931. A later measure
against
alcohol consumption was a 1976 law that banned liquor
advertisements in most publications. Another measure
increased
the cost of alcohol by taxing it heavily, so much so that
by the
mid-1980s liquor taxes were an important out source of
state
revenues.
In the 1980s, there were still many abstainers in
Finland who
had moral objections to alcohol use, in contrast to the
small
minority of drinkers who accounted for more than half of
total
national consumption. In the late 1960s, a relaxation of
the
rules for the purchase of alcohol had as its goal a
lessening of
drink's glamorous appeal because it was, in a sense,
forbidden.
This policy may have backfired when sales of beer in
grocery
stores and the availability of hard liquor at more
restaurants
caused alcohol consumption to more than double within a
decade.
Since the mid-1970s, however, analysts of Finnish alcohol
use
have seen consumption rates level off and drinking habits
become
more moderate. Although the number of abstainers had
dropped
sharply in the postwar period, causing some sociologists
to refer
to Finns who became adults in the 1950s and the 1960s as
"the wet
generation," alcohol was gradually coming to take a more
ordinary
place in everyday life.
The Ministry of Social Affairs and Health had a special
department concerned with substance abuse, the Department
of
Temperance and Alcohol Policy, that formulated welfare
plans and
directed the State Alcohol Monopoly responsible for the
manufacture, importation, and sale of alcohol. Local
authorities
provided a variety of facilities for alcoholics--including
clinics, half-way houses, and emergency housing open
twenty-four
hours a day that offered withdrawal treatments. When
necessary,
alcoholics could be confined against their will, but this
practice was less common in the late 1980s than it had
been
previously. State welfare was supplemented by private and
voluntary associations, such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
Data as of December 1988
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