LEGALIZED MURDER:

Norway's Heroin Lows: The model welfare state is a prime market for the rising Afghan opium trade. Mounting overdoses and ruined lives are the result. (Jeffrey Fleishman, November 29, 2004, LA Times)

She said she only smoked heroin, but there were needle bruises on her neck. She said she loved her boyfriend, but she stood on a corner and offered herself to others. She said she was a girl, but then remembered she had become a woman. She said she wanted to quit, but she knew she wouldn't.

Across town in a brick chapel, Father Jon Atle Wetaas lighted three votive candles. "These are for peace and reflection," the priest said. "We never know what we'll meet out there." Then he and a nurse loaded a camper with clean needles, medicine and coffee and drove the streets searching for some of the estimated 5,000 to 7,000 heroin addicts that shadow this Norwegian port city.

They came upon the woman on the corner, a shattered 18-year-old desperately looking to fill her empty syringe. Her name was Katrin Nygard Helgeland.

"I try to quit," she said, her face pale in the autumn half-light. "I get depressed, and I run away inside myself."

Clean and tidy Oslo, the capital of a nation with one of the highest standards of living and some of the best social programs in the world, is one of Europe's heroin havens. Three years ago, it recorded more overdoses than any other major European city. [...]

The heroin scourge has been creeping through Oslo for decades. It surfaced in the late 1960s in the park near the palace and spread along the cobbled pedestrian mall until it landed at the plata, the park adjoining the train station. What began as a druggy counterculture movement of "flower power hippies," Eeg said, evolved into a population of medical and psychological outcasts that is testing Norway's sympathy for the downtrodden.

The plata had become a sinister yet fabled hangout for teenagers wanting to experiment with heroin and for prostitutes, who could sometimes be seen lifting their skirts to insert needles near their hips. "It was attracting boys who bought drugs and went home," said Gjengedal, who estimated that Oslo had about 60 street-level dealers. "It was turning them into users and creating other crimes. We had to move against it."

Heroin is smoked throughout much of the Continent. But Norway, with its history of secret heavy drinking to skirt temperance campaigns, is known for intravenous drug users seeking stronger highs. This binge mentality, social workers say, increases the risk of overdose because addicts frequently mix alcohol and depressants with heroin. Over the decades, the problem has spread beyond Oslo, and the government estimates that Norway has about 14,000 addicts.

In 1990, the nation had 75 overdose deaths. Government statistics show that the number of fatalities rose dramatically — to 270 in 1998 and 338 in 2001. The amount of heroin coming out of Afghanistan fell in 2002 and 2003, and the number of Norwegian deaths dropped to 210, then 172.

The decline also was attributed to less potent heroin and street-level medical and shelter services, such as those run by Franciscan Aid and the Church City Mission. In another attempt to limit overdoses, Oslo is expected to open a "public injection room" next year, where addicts can shoot up under the supervision of nurses.

Even though the number of heroin deaths is increasing, it's too early to determine if that's part of a trend. In 2003, Oslo had 53 overdoses. By October of this year, there were 64. Authorities attributed 11 deaths during an 18-day period in May to a powerful batch of heroin — another indication that purer Afghan drugs are reaching the market.

The problem tarnishes Norway's image as a country of splendid fjords and forests.

Thought moral permissiveness was supposed to solve all these problems?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 29, 2004 8:46 AM