What's in a Name?: Alcohol and Drug Treatment and the Politics of Confusion

Abstract

Aims The aim of this article is to investigate the use of a rather vague medical conceptual framework within the compulsory treatment of alcohol and drug users in Sweden during the 20th century. The focus lies on exploring how a phenomenon came to be described as pathological, what the causes are for certain actions being suddenly interpreted in medical terms, and what consequences that might lead to. Design Supported by theoretical speculations on medicalization processes and conceptual history, two empirical cases (the compulsory care of alcohol abusers in the 1950s and the legislative process leading to psychiatric compulsory care of drug users in the late 1960s) are investigated. The first case draws mainly upon official reports and archive material from alcohol treatment institutions, whilst the second case is built from reading official reports and parliamentary material. The research task for the two empirical cases has not quite been the same: whereas the first case is illustrated by the discrepancies between the labelling of treatment activities and the treatment actually carried out, the second case rather draws upon the enlargement of the field of signification of the disease concept to cover most aspects of drug use. Results A medicalization process on different levels is traced both in the post-war compulsory treatment of alcohol abusers as well as the compulsory psychiatric care for drug abusers that was introduced from the late 1960s onwards. Conclusion The investigated cases show how the medicalization processes benefited from conceptual vagueness, leading to a widening of the conceptual dimensions of both the treatment and disease concepts. In this, the medicalization of alcohol abuse in the 1950s and drug abuse in the 1960s made way for a paternalistic justification of compulsory care measures that might otherwise have become politically troublesome.