Legal, new varieties of cannabis have time to reach stores before they are classified as narcotics.
New drugs are banned all the time, but replaced directly by new variants through a loophole in the law.
At the same time, more and more children are overdosing and need to be treated in hospital.
Last spring, TV4 Nyheterna was able to reveal that the cannabis drug HHC was sold openly in Swedish stores and online – completely legally. In the form of sweets and e-cigarettes with the flavor of cotton candy, banana and cola, the product had a great impact and was marketed to children and young people in social media.
Shortly after the disclosure, HHC was classified as a narcotic, which was immediately replaced by new legal cannabis varieties on the market. 12 of these will be banned today – but new drugs have already reached the market, in what the Swedish Customs Service describes as a cat and mouse game between drug producers and the authorities.
– This is a pattern that we see repeated year after year, that there are new variants that are legal for a while until they are investigated and have been classified as narcotics, says Jenny Åberg, an expert at the Swedish Customs Service to TV4 Nyheterna.
Drug-addicted 13-year-olds talk about psychosis
A 13-year-old girl tells TV4 Nyheterna how she had a psychosis that lasted ten hours, another about how she developed an addiction that required treatment at the health care facility.
The new cannabis varieties, substances that have been chemically altered in labs, are falsely marketed as safe – despite the fact that there is no scientific evidence for this.
– They have made a chemical change and it is not known, nobody knows, how it affects the effect of the substance in the body, continues Jenny Åberg.
The minister: “The system basically works well”
Norway and Denmark have prohibition processes that differ from the Swedish model, where new substances within the same family are automatically classified as narcotics.
In Sweden, each new substance must be investigated separately. The government does not rule out future changes to the Swedish system, but has no proposals for legislative changes.
Minister of Social Affairs Jakob Forssmed (KD) underlines the importance that drug classification of new drugs must proceed quickly. This is because the substances do not enter the market and thus can be sold legally during the time it is being investigated.
– The system basically works well, but it requires us to constantly work on tuning it so that we get as little time as possible, says Minister of Social Affairs Jakob Forssmed (KD) to TV4 Nyheterna.