This report accounts for proceedings and results from a European study on media images on addiction in 6 European countries: Finland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Hungary and the United Kingdom.

The study provides new knowledge on the role of the mass media in construing different images of addiction related problems, and how these roles can be traced to different European traditions when it comes to welfare systems; tasks of the print press and mass media landscapes. Trends of de-politicisation and individualisation were the most striking overall developments over time.

Question:

Can a country's alcohol policies say something about what kind of tobacco policies are implemented? Or does a strict set of gambling policies guarantee that the country also has implemented strict policies for other addictive substances or behaviours?

The work undertaken in Work package 14, task 1, looks at policy scales for alcohol, tobacco, gambling and illicit drgus, in slightly different ways depending on the addiction and the history of previous scaling attempts. Two brand new policy scales were developed within the Alice Rap project - one for gambling policies and another one dealing with cannabis and heroin. Two previously constructed scales, one for alcohol and one for tobacco, are also included in the work package and their structures and methodology are systematically compared to each other.

The objective of this study is to inquire the ways in which different European welfare states deal with alcoholism, compulsive gambling and eating disorders. This is studied through the perceptions of these problems as expressed by two welfare professional groups, general practitioners and social workers, in three European countries: Finland, Italy and Poland.

This deliverable is a synthesis of the work carried out in the context of the Work package 13 of the Governance view Area of the ALICE RAP and it is complemented by the book “Governance of Addictions – European Public Policies” that has been accepted to be published by Oxford University Press.

This study investigated the popular images of nine different addictions in five European countries (Poland, Norway, Germany, Finland, and Sweden).