"More Concerned About Mr. and Mrs. Denmark": Coping with Pandemic Crisis at the Intersection of Homelessness and Drug Use.

This article builds on fieldwork conducted during lockdown in Denmark among users of services at the intersection of homelessness and drug use. The paper bridges two distinct approaches to understanding the relation between marginalization and crisis, with one focused on the impact of "big events" on marginalized populations, and another on everyday strategies employed to survive situations of homelessness and drug use. The paper shows how past experiences of hardship became relevant for coping with pandemic crisis. It further exploreshow, through critical engagement with dominant accounts of vulnerability, research participants carved out a space for negotiating their marginality in the Danish welfare state.

What's in Stock? Drug drought anticipation during COVID-19 among people who use drugs and service providers.

BACKGROUND: As with other areas of life, drug markets have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions. This article examines how structurally vulnerable people who use drugs (PWUD) experienced and adapted to changes in street drug markets caused by lockdown measures. METHODS: The article builds on ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish cities in 2020, including in-depth interviews with 22 PWUD, and interviews with 20 service providers, including low-threshold service providers and outreach workers. RESULTS: The most consistently reported effect of lockdown measures on local drug markets related to increases in cannabis prices. Accounts of changes in drug availability varied greatly, with some participants reporting changing availability while others described the situation as similar to pre-lockdown conditions. Rather than a long-term drug shortage, changes reported by participants related to the anticipated disruption of local markets and drug scarcity, restrictions in access to cash and sellers seeking to capitalize on the crisis. CONCLUSION: Although no long-term drug scarcity was seen, the anticipation of a shortage was sufficient to impact on local drug market dynamics. Heterogeneity in PWUDs' experiences of access to drug markets during lockdown can to some degree be explained in terms of their varied embeddedness in social networks. While local markets proved resilient to lockdown measures, PWUD less embedded in social networks were more vulnerable to shifts in drug availability and to sellers' over-pricing of drugs.

Danish cannabis policy revisited: Multiple framings of cannabis use in policy discourse.

Aim: This article traces recent developments in Danish cannabis policy, by exploring how "cannabis use" is problematised and governed within different co-existing policy areas. Background: Recently, many countries have changed their cannabis policy by introducing medical cannabis and/or by moving toward legalisation or decriminalisation. Researchers have thus argued that traditional notions of cannabis as a singular and coherent object, are being replaced by perspectives that highlight the multiple ontological character of cannabis. At the same time, there is growing recognition that drug policy is not a unitary phenomenon, but rather composed by multiple "policy areas", each defined by particular notions of what constitutes the relevant policy "problem". Design: We draw on existing research, government reports, policy papers and media accounts of policy and policing developments. Results: We demonstrate how Danish cannabis policy is composed of different co-existing framings of cannabis use; as respectively a social problem, a problem of deviance, an organised crime problem, a health- and risk problem and as a medical problem. Conclusion: While the international trend seems to be that law-and-order approaches are increasingly being replaced by more liberal approaches, Denmark, on an overall level, seems to be moving in the opposite direction: Away from a lenient decriminalisation policy and towards more repressive approaches. We conclude that the prominence of discursive framings of cannabis use as a "problem of deviance" and as "a driver of organised crime", has been key to this process.