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In 2004 the Danish Parliament re-penalized possession of illegal drugs for personal consumption after 35 years of de-penalization. This article presents an analysis of this shift away from a relatively liberal drug policy and towards a more repressive drug policy and places it in a context of the shifting balances between control and welfare in Danish drug policy since 1955. The article analyzes the background for the first penalization of possession in 1955, de-penalization in 1969 and re-penalization in 2004, focusing particularly on how the drug using subject was constructed at these three important moments in the history of Danish drug policy. The article furthermore analyzes the changes in 1969 and 2004 as part of more general changes of welfare policy and penal policy in Denmark. The article is based on analyses of Danish drug legislation and policy documents.

Using quantitative methods Danish cannabis debate in national newspapers is investigated. The investigation shows that the most prevalent topics relate to law enforcement. Legalization has become an increasingly important topic in the Danish cannabis debate and the investigation shows a reframing of this debate to become increasingly related to concerns about organized crime. In this way the Danish cannabis legalization debate show the same development as the debates that have led to legalization certain states in the United States of America.

Drug policy has spread into new areas of society and new players are now engaged in this policy. This leads to the question: How can we understand and explain the increasingly complex puzzle that we call drug policy?

A very wide range of drug policies are implemented in contemporary societies - not only by governments, but also by local communities, organisations, public institutions, private enterprises, sports clubs etc., with consequences for drug users, citizens and society in general.

In Drug Policy anthropologists, criminologists and sociologists analyse different aspects of drug policy, seeing it as a way of regulation drugs - including control, treatment, prevention and harm reduction. Using examples from both Denmark and the USA, the authors' approach is to focus in particular on the history and consequences of drug policy in practice. The topic is analysed on an international, national as well as local level. This book will be of great value to advanced undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in drug policy, as well as to academics, practitioners and policy makers in the drug field.

Background: In 2004 the Danish parliament repenalised possession of illicit drugs for personal use after it had been depenalised for 35 years. This article analyses the introduction of a more repressive drug policy in Denmark by studying how drug use and drug users were problematized in two key government whitepapers and how this problematization articulated a more general problematisation of 'a culture of intoxication' among young Danes. The analysis also shows how the policy change involved a change of governmentality away from a welfarist and towards a neo-liberal governmentality. The analysis particularly focuses on the implications of these problematisations for the constitution of young drug users a 'governable subjects'. Methods: The article takes its inspiration from research that has applied governmentality theory to analyse drug policy and particularly how the governmentalities that drug policies articulate involve different subjectifications of drug users. Within this overall framework the article also takes inspiration from Carol Bacchi's post-structural approach to policy analysis to show the assumptions about young people, drugs and how to govern them before and after the policy change. Results: The new drug policy articulated new ways of problematising drug use and the young drug user. Drug use was no longer defined as more or less socially conditioned but as an individual choice made by a rational actor. Punishment for violating the drug legislation should make the drug user responsible for his or her transgressions and deter others from making similar transgressions. Conclusion: Research has shown that neo-liberal discourses can lead to more empowering and harm reduction oriented drug policies. This is not the case in Denmark. Here neo-liberal discourses led to a more repressive drug policy. Briefly accounting for some of the lived effects of the new drug policy, the article shows how socially disadvantaged parts of the Danish population bears the burden on the more punitive drug policy. This more repressive drug policy goes against the trend in several other European countries that have become less repressive. However, even if Danish drug policy has become more repressive, the legal measures taken against drug users in Denmark are still fairly 'mild' compared with the legal measures taken against drug users in other countries.

This research note reports on five online workshops by an international team of scholars, the authors, with shared interests in drug (mis)use. The workshops comprise a novel form of collective international qualitative secondary analysis (iQSA) exploring the possibilities for, and value of, qualitative data reuse across international contexts. These preparatory workshops comprise the preliminary stages of a longer programme of methodological development of iQSA, and we used them to identify what challenges there may be for translating evidence across international contexts, what strategies might be best placed to support or facilitate analytical engagement in this direction, and if possible, what empirical value such exchange might have. We discuss how working across international contexts involved the authors in new 'translational' work to address the challenges of establishing and sharing meaning. Such 'translation' entailed a modest degree of empirical engagement, namely, the casing of empirical examples from our datasets that supported an articulation of our various research studies, a collective interrogation of how, why and which such cases could be used for best translational effect and a collective reflexive engagement with how these cases generated new and novel questions that in turn re-engaged us with our own data in new ways. Descriptions of our datasets, therefore, emerged as multifaceted assemblages of 'expertise' and comprised the evidential bases for new empirical insights, research questions and directions.