Dear Sweden

Sweden is now the #1 country in Europe for gun violence, among those that are not at war.  I would humbly like to contribute to the discussion around dealing with this tragic situation, if I may.

Last week I spent five days in the midwestern US, mostly in Michigan, amid the post-industrial, depopulated landscape of Detroit and other towns.  I had some fun house concerts, especially the one in Ferndale, outside Detroit, and I caught up with long-lost friends, and wandered around the crumbling urban landscapes.  When I was in the air en route and while driving, as is generally the case, I was listening to a lot of news and podcasts, and whether it was BBC or the Guardian or Al-Jazeera, one of the stories that has dominated international news coverage lately has been gangs and gun violence in Sweden, of all things.

I'll just say up front that the idea of anyone from a place as catastrophically messed up as the United States having any useful advice for people running a country as comparatively well-organized and well-off as Sweden seems ridiculous.  But I feel compelled to contribute my perspective to the discussion I keep hearing about on what to do about these very alarming levels of gun violence and use of explosives that have recently made Sweden #1 in gun violence in Europe, among countries that aren't at war.  As I do so, I hope it's clear that I speak as an American with more than a passing familiarity with Sweden, and also as a big fan of both Swedish society and of the many achievements of Swedish social democracy.

According to the coverage I've heard, the many Swedes from different parts of the political spectrum that we've been hearing from have focused either on stricter enforcement of various laws, harsher prison sentences, and other punitive responses on one end, and on the other, more social services, more funding for schools and community centers, and otherwise basically more of the good things we all associate with social democracy, that have worked so well for so many Swedes and other Scandinavians for the past century or so.  My friends in Sweden tell me my impressions of the conversation also reflect Swedish-language, local press coverage as well.

Coming from the very segregated USA, with its terrible inequalities, lack of social services, and chronic lack of social mobility, seeing how Swedish society functioned was a revelation to me, when I first visited, over twenty years ago.  Here was a society, far more multiethnic and immigrant-heavy than many outsiders realize, with real opportunity for everyone to have affordable housing, to have health care, to get a good, free education and so forth.

Many other things quickly became evident about Sweden, as I spent more time there.  Especially coming from Denmark, which I began to become acquainted with before I first went to Sweden.  

In Denmark, Sweden has a reputation for being a more socially conservative, even somewhat more religious society, governed by more traditional, stricter attitudes towards things like alcohol and drug consumption.  For example, as all Swedes know well, alcohol is heavily taxed and very expensive in Sweden, unlike in Denmark, where beer is cheaper than water, as many Danes are fond of pointing out, as they crack open another one.  And of the dozens of countries I've traveled to regularly, there are three where I've had the unpleasant experience of being strip-searched by border agents searching for drugs -- the US, Norway, and Sweden.

In so many obvious ways Sweden and Denmark are similar societies, as prosperous, egalitarian (compared to the vast majority of the rest of the world) social democracies.  The two countries adopted distinctively different policies towards alcohol in the early twentieth century.  A century ago both countries imposed high taxes on hard liquor, while Denmark exempted beer from the high taxes, and Sweden didn't.  It's pretty obvious to any casual observer today who spends much time in both countries that the Danes drink more beer than the Swedes, and Swedes make more moonshine than the Danes do.  It's also fair to observe that in neither country is there any gun violence related to the alcohol trade.

The gun violence and occasional use of grenades and accidental or intentional explosions that has been a feature of urban life in Sweden recently to an alarming degree has also been a problem in Denmark for some time, as everyone in both countries is well aware, especially in cities like Copenhagen, Malmo, Gothenburg and Stockholm.  In recent years during my regular visits to Copenhagen I've been in town when someone threw a grenade into a shop in Norrebro.  I've been in town when someone sprayed machine gun fire at random around Pusher Street in Christiania, and on another occasion when a young man involved with the drug trade shot and killed a cop there.

The socioeconomic phenomenon that is playing out here is one that all of the pedagogues and social workers that I know in Copenhagen seem to broadly agree on, and their observations also mirror my own.

I'll just sheepishly make the admission here that I not only regularly visit Denmark and Sweden, among other countries, but I'm also a cannabis aficionado, and I'm very familiar with who sells cannabis and where to get it, in any country I've spent time in.  This is precisely why I can so readily say that the phenomenon the pedagogues are observing is so very real.

Long before the influx of refugees from Syria and elsewhere that came to Europe in 2015, there were refugees and migrants coming to Europe.  This has meant, of course, lots of new residents entering lots of legal professions.  But for people who don't have much education, or don't yet have work papers, or can't get them, illegal jobs often seem like the only avenue.  This most commonly means getting involved with the very lucrative trade in illegal drugs, especially that most popular of illegal drugs, cannabis.

When trying to open a business in a lucrative illegal market fueled by tens of thousands of regular consumers in every city, one problem you face is the law, but the bigger one by all accounts in Scandinavia are the organized criminal networks that dominate the illegal drug trade.  I was shocked and bewildered when I first learned of the prominence of the Hell's Angels in Scandinavia, but I know for most of my Scandinavian readers I'm not telling you anything new in informing you of the presence of these folks in the local drug trade.

But the way this plays out on the street, this control of a lucrative illegal business by one organized crime network, is when new people come in who are trying to get a cut of the business, in the absence of any agreed-upon way of dividing up the turf among the interested parties, things can easily devolve into physical violence.  Christiania and Norrebro are the neighborhoods in Copenhagen where most people would go to buy illegal drugs, and it's no coincidence that these are also the neighborhoods where the aforementioned guns and explosives have been used.

I'm not suggesting that the gun violence in Sweden is all about competition for the drug trade between the Hell's Angels and the illegal entrepreneurs from the migrant and refugee communities.  Certainly in Copenhagen there has at times been that dynamic, with all the trade being run by white Danes in one neighborhood, and all of the dealers in another neighborhood being Arab.  The important point, though, is not about how the lines may get drawn in conflicts over a lucrative illegal trade, but that the trade is illegal in the first place.

In Sweden you'll often hear about how Denmark is a more permissive society when it comes to a lot of different things, including drugs.  But I'd point out that though it's true I've never been strip-searched by the police in Denmark, cannabis is also illegal there, and as a result, is a lucrative illegal business happening beneath the noses of the authorities trying episodically to stamp it out.  It's a business that's very attractive to people without an education because it can make you a lot of money, but the rules are there are no rules, so might makes right is often the guiding principle.

Here in Portland, Oregon, where I sit in my apartment at present, we have about as much gun violence as the entire nation of Sweden.  The US is a failed state, off the charts as far as gun violence goes.  But there are lessons to be learned everywhere, and that's just as true here.

Here in the US, the devastating violence involving competition over a lucrative illegal trade continues, as do harsh punishments, a massive population of people in prison, and no end in sight to the drug problem or the violence problem that the authorities try to address with bloated, militarized police departments and the huge numbers of prisons everywhere.

Some rays of hope have pierced through the dystopia surrounding us here, though, and they have involved legalizing cannabis.  It's a move that no legislative body in the US has ever managed to make unassisted, but through the vehicle of popular referendums, cannabis has been legalized in about half the country at this point.  In spite of many other factors in society that tend to make the crime rate worse, such as a growing class divide and the rapidly-worsening housing crisis in most of the country, the more reliable studies indicate that in the states where cannabis has been legalized, crime rates have decreased.  

There's even been a knock-on effect with a decrease in crime in neighboring states.  I can personally attest to this phenomenon, since the state just to the north of Oregon, Washington, legalized cannabis before we did, so I and many other people living here used to make regular trips up to the nearest town across the state border to buy our pot, before it was legalized in Oregon as well.

Given the types of dynamics I've observed with the way the drug trade plays out in Danish society, it's not especially surprising to me that in Sweden, which took in more refugees per capita than any other country in Europe in 2015, should now have a bigger problem than Denmark has had, and indeed a bigger problem than any other country in Europe now (that's not at war).  

Legalizing cannabis will certainly not suddenly solve all the complex social problems at once, it won't de-traumatize traumatized refugees or their alienated children, those second-generation migrants who are central to so many recent news stories in Sweden.  But it would remove a major, if not perhaps the major, illegal market, fueled as it is by hundreds of thousands of regular Swedish cannabis users.

Legalizing cannabis is not a panacea, of course, and fears some people have that legalizing it will increase its use in society may have a solid basis.  Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that this is the case.  One interesting finding here has been that where cannabis has been legalized, people tend to drink less alcohol, overall.  So rather than being a "window drug" to more harmful substances like alcohol, cannabis use tends to have the opposite impact.

If it's true, as I would frame the situation, that your choice as a society may be between maintaining your ongoing cannabis prohibition and seeing a rise in gang conflicts and gun violence, or legalizing cannabis and seeing a decrease in these problems, the way to go seems obvious -- legalize it.  

There are so many pitfalls you can avoid as a society by not doing as we do in the United States.  Like the failed policies of militarizing your police forces, expanding your prison system, or allowing the class divide to dramatically grow over time.  But there are occasionally examples here worthy of emulating, and the legalization of cannabis in the 23 US states which have so far done so seems clearly to be one of them, and one that Sweden could benefit from.