Editing Nils Bejerot (section)

==Politics==
During his time in [[sanatorium]]s while suffering tuberculosis, he met people of different ages with different experiences, and the discussions they had he later claimed encouraged him to study and become involved in political activity, becoming a member of the Communist Party and other Socialist-affiliated organizations. When he started to study medicine in 1947 his social and political commitments made him a slow student.<ref name="minnesbok"/> However,  [[Nikita Khrushchev]]'s secret speech in 1956 at the 20th Party Congress led Bejerot to question the whole communist system; the illusion of the glorious future of communism was definitely shattered when the [[Soviet Union]] invaded Hungary, causing Bejerot to quit all activities in politics and focus on the study of medicine.<ref name="minnesbok" />

Bejerot also advocated against violence in comic books. While working at the Karolinska Institute between 1952 and 1954, he wrote his 1954 book ''Barn, serie, samhälle'' (Children, Comics, Society), itself largely an adaptation of [[Fredric Wertham]]'s book ''[[Seduction of the Innocent]]'', also published in 1954. He did not come back to this topic in his later books.

Bejerot also strongly advocated for strict anti-drug laws. In 1965, Bejerot started to engage in the Swedish debate on drug abuse, encouraging tough action against the new and rapidly growing problem. He followed closely a rather clumsy experiment with legal prescription of heroin, amphetamine, etc. to drug addicts, studies that formed the basis for his thesis on the epidemic drug spread. Bejerot claimed that the program would increase the number of drug addicts and showed through counting of injection marks that the number of drug addicts in Stockholm continued to grow fast during the experiment. The program was stopped in 1968.<ref name="bejer">[http://www.rns.se/swedish-addiction.asp Nils Bejerot: The Swedish addiction epidemic in a global perspective, a speech given in 1988 in France, the Soviet Union and USA.] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070622121241/http://www.rns.se/swedish-addiction.asp |date=22 June 2007 }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/boekhout.swedish.html |title=The Swedish Drug Control System |access-date=16 May 2009 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150923201458/http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/boekhout.swedish.html |archive-date=23 September 2015 |url-status=dead }}</ref> From 1968 and onward, the difference between the epidemic type, the therapeutic type and the [[Endemic (epidemiology)|endemic type]] of drug abuse was a repeated issue in Bejerot's writing and lectures.<ref name="bejer" /><ref>[http://www.drugtext.org/library/articles/92333.html Rachel Lart British Medical perception from Rolleston to brain, changing images of the addict and addiction] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110610141829/http://www.drugtext.org/library/articles/92333.html |date=10 June 2011 }}</ref><ref>[http://www.drugtext.org/Second-Brain-Report/drug-addiction-2.html DRUG ADDICTION, MINISTRY OF HEALTH, London, 1965] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110927050525/http://www.drugtext.org/Second-Brain-Report/drug-addiction-2.html |date=27 September 2011 }}</ref>

In 1969, Bejerot became one of the founders of the Association for a Drug-Free Society (RNS), which played – and still plays – an important role in shaping Swedish drug policies.<ref>[http://www.rns.se/about-rns.asp RNS] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070622121129/http://www.rns.se/about-rns.asp |date=22 June 2007 }}</ref><ref>[http://www.rns.se/Inneh.aspx?b=Blogg&k=English&p=5205789014366969848 About RNS] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110831091709/http://www.rns.se/Inneh.aspx?b=Blogg&k=English&p=5205789014366969848 |date=31 August 2011 }}</ref> Bejerot warned of the consequences of an ‘epidemic addiction’, prompted by young, psychologically and socially unstable persons who, usually after direct personal initiation from another drug abuser, begin to use socially nonaccepted, intoxicating drugs to gain euphoria.<ref>[http://www.unodc.org/pdf/research/Swedish_drug_control.pdf United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: Sweden’s successful drug policy: a review of the evidence]</ref><ref>[http://www.rns.se/english.asp The Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society (RNS)] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081205041221/http://www.rns.se/english.asp |date=5 December 2008 }}</ref> In 1972, Bejerots' reports were used as one of the reasons for increasing the maximum penalty for grave drug offences in Sweden to 10 years in prison. In 1974 he was called to testify as one of 21 scientific experts on marijuana for a subcommittee of the [[United States Senate]] on the marijuana-hashish epidemic and its impact on United States security.<ref name="congre" /><ref>[http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/1986/01b.html Reed Irvine: THE MEDIA AS DRUG PROMOTERS, AIM Report January 1986]</ref>

He advocated [[zero tolerance]]<ref group=Note name=zero/> for illegal use and possession of drugs, including all drugs not covered by prescription, something that today is law in Sweden. In the early 1980s, he became one of the "Top 10 opinion molders" in Sweden for this. Bejerot is by [[UNODC]] and many others recognized as founder of the Swedish strategy against recreational use of drugs. His demand for zero tolerance<ref group=Note name=zero/> as a [[drug policy]] was for a long time seen as extreme, but during the late 1970s opinion changed. He is without doubt the person most responsible for changing the Swedish drug policy in a restrictive direction<ref name="bejerh">{{Cite web |url=http://www.nilsbejerot.se/om.htm |title=About Nils Bejerot (written by his admirers) |access-date=23 April 2006 |archive-date=21 February 2017 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170221232045/http://www.nilsbejerot.se/om.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>[http://www.socialstyrelsen.se/NR/rdonlyres/9BABA972-7D30-4808-8051-BF6D82341617/4127/200510712.pdf Socialstyrelsen. Säkerställd socialmedicinsk kompetens inom svensk hälso- och sjukvård, 2005, page 117]{{dead link|date=February 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref> something that made him a controversial person, both before and after his death.<ref name="chatw">[https://web.archive.org/web/20110606161128/http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/04/19/07/chatwin.pdf C. M. Chatwin: On the Possibility of Policy Harmonisation for some Illicit Drugs in Selected Member States of the European Union]</ref> Many people considered Bejerot as a good [[humanism|humanist]] advocating a viable policy against narcotics and [[Robert DuPont]] considers him "the hero of the Swedish drug abuse story."<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20210411045143/http://www.wfad08.org/_downloads/_pdf/DuPont-WFAD_Plenary_Talk.pdf Presentation at the World Forum Against Drugs (WFAD)Stockholm, Sweden September 8, 2008 by Robert L. DuPont, M.D.]</ref> Others view this as a [[reactionary]] hindering of new treatment practices against drug abuse.<ref>[https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0DD143CF931A35751C1A96E948260 New York Times: Nils Bejerot, 67, Pioneer in Study of Drug Abuse, 1988]</ref>

Bejerot's theories about spread of drug abuse and proposals for an anti-drug policy have still a significant influence on the [[drug policy of Sweden]]. When [[R. Gil Kerlikowske]] the Director of National Drug Control Policy in May 2012, announced an updated version of U.S. President [[Barack Obama]]'s administration's drug policy he referred to what happened in the experiment with legal prescription of drugs in 1965 that was studied by Bejerot in his doctoral thesis.<ref>[http://wfad.se/images/articles/WFAD_2012_-_Gil_R._Kerlikowske.pdf Principles of modern Drug policy, Statement of the Government of America, World Federation against drugs 3rd Forum, Stockholm, May 21 2012]</ref>