Still A Junkie Nation

Related to the article I posted earlier.

As you can read from the article I linked to, Finland was a leading consumer of heroin from the 1930s to the 1950s. Heroin was legal and easy to get. Things changed because Finland wanted to join the UN.

WI things wouldn't have changed? How would things be in Finland? What would Finland's reputation be like? etc.

Don't know what the PoD could be though; Finland not joining to the UN? UN breaking during it's early years? No UN at all?

Two later ones would also mean a quite different world from OTL in general.
 
It's hard to see how Finland can avoid joining the UN without some major political change, though like Switzerland, it could probably put it off for a while longer. In which case it would likely develop a junkie-tourist problem, much like the Netherlands. Until the late 1960s, heroin in Europe was a niche drug in a niche market. The problem was numerically small and socially not terribly significant since the supply was there and most addicts could afford their fix. In Finland, where the main issue would have been medical abuse, difficultues would be still less significant. But come the 70s, heroin goes 'mainstream' and a lot of people will be looking for a cheaper source. Which, to the junkies and dealers of Stockholm and Copenhagen, is likely to be the ferry to Helsinki, just like it was the train to Amsterdam for the potheads of Germany. This is bad because it introduces a drug culture into a setting that up to now was mostly medicalised and brings crime and all manner of misbehaviour with it.

Mind, the media exposure from elsewhere may well be enough to change things - if young Finns get told their cough syrup is a deadly ultrahallucinogenic superdrug, they may well be temted to use it for that purpose.

Not nice. I don't know enough about the finnish government in the 70s, how are they likely to react to things like this? I'm thinking passport checks at pharmacies and prescription-only, with the requisite black market rackets springing up immediately.
 
Question is: why wouldn't Finland want to join the UN.

Maybe it takes a more extreme view of what neutrality means? Switzerland mainly kept out because it had managed fine without before and wasn't interested in any military adventures outside its borders.

I can't think of any convincing reason, though. Could it become a Cold war issue? Moscow feeling unsure of Finland's support in the Assembly and the USA too eagerly pushing for entry? 0
 
Maybe it takes a more extreme view of what neutrality means? Switzerland mainly kept out because it had managed fine without before and wasn't interested in any military adventures outside its borders.
Finland's situation was quite different from Switzerland's, though.

I can't think of any convincing reason, though. Could it become a Cold war issue? Moscow feeling unsure of Finland's support in the Assembly and the USA too eagerly pushing for entry? 0
That might do it.
 
Top