Norway youth parties call for drug decriminalization

 

AUF, the youth wing of the Labour Party, and Socialist Youth, the junior wing of the Socialist Left Party, have endorsed an end to legal punishments for drug users. 

 

The far-left Red Youth has also adopted a platform that calls on Norway to completely legalize the use of soft drugs. 

 

“We don’t encourage anyone to take drugs, but there are limits to how long we can accept a drug policy that does not work,” the youth party’s leader, Linn-Elise Ohn Mehlen, told Klassekampen. 

 

The youth parties’ positions may represent a significant change in Norway, where left-wing parties have a long tradition of supporting very restrictive narcotics policies. 

 

However, the mother parties on the left have not endorsed their youth chapters’ plans just yet although Labour did join AUF in backing heroin-assisted health care to the heaviest drug abusers.

 

Around 260 Norwegians die from drug overdoses each year. Only Estonia has more overdose deaths per capita.