The criminal law and public health context of drug policy support among young people in the European Union

This article addresses whether state-level policy differences in the European Union (EU) are associated with young people's support for policies toward drug users, namely criminalization of drug use and availability of syringe exchanges. While historical institutionalism provides reason to expect such an association, more proximal individual-level influences, as well as the EU supranational agenda encouraging a unified approach to drug policy, may render the state-level unimportant. Using multilevel modeling of a 2002 Eurobarometer cross-national survey of young people, the results show a close alignment of individual-level support and state-level policies of decriminalization and harm reduction, net of individual characteristics. The findings suggest that any EU-level effort to unify countries' policies concerning drug users will encounter difficulty because attitudes - even among young people - are aligned with and supportive of existing state policies.