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Lately, there has been massive media coverage of gang-related criminality in 'exposed areas' in Sweden. Politicians have blamed the illegal drugs trade without questioning the country's prohibitionist drug policy. This study analyzes how cannabis is constructed in Swedish newspaper articles that mention both organized crime and cannabis. We ask how the drug and its buyers and sellers are described, what discourses are drawn upon, and discuss the relationship between media coverage and drug policy. We analyzed recent (2021) articles from four newspapers (n = 71) through Critical Discourse Analysis. Cannabis was constructed as a commodity linked to violence and deviance. Agency was attributed to people with power and status (e.g. gang leaders), and recreational cannabis users were described as guilty of feeding organized crime. A combination of economic and moral discourses was used to make the reported events meaningful, and to motivate both prohibition and decriminalization/legalization. The study shows that assumedly neutral journalistic voices emphasized the link between cannabis and violence and problematized cannabis buyers and sellers. This homogenous media coverage will probably contribute to keep the question of cannabis law reform discursively lifeless in Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates 20 years of discursive struggles in Nordic medical journals around the process of legitimating and routinising gestational surrogacy and uterus transplantation in Finland and Sweden. The comparative analysis through critical discourse analysis suggests that influential health care professionals have contributed to different levels of legal and cultural adaptation of the methods, prioritising non-commercial gestational surrogacy in Finland and uterus transplantation in Sweden. The article identifies central discursive turning points in the medical journal discussions by interpreting them against the background of medical and policy developments in Finland and Sweden during the analysed twenty-year period. Legitimation and routinisation of surrogacy and uterus transplantation were developed through biomedicalisation by representing them as infertility treatments and emphasising the relational dynamics between donors and recipients—a connection that in the Nordic context is often based on kinship or close relationships. The diagnosis of absolute uterine factor infertility was central to representing women as on the boundary between fertile and infertile, as they may have functioning ovaries. Through the biomedicalised rhetoric of equal opportunities for biogenetic motherhood, the diagnosed women’s ambiguous reproductive status was used to legitimise the two methods as cures for absolute infertility, thereby reinforcing hegemonic family and kinship norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]