Migration, substance use and interventions in Europe

This symposium will cover the state of the art of European research in the domain of migration, substance use and interventions. It is a follow-up session of the 2019 Migration, drugs use and treatment symposium, as a lot has changed in this emerging research domain in Europe since 2019. Moreover, this symposium is a replenishment of the UNODC structured session titled “Addressing substance use and substance use disorders in humanitarian settings: The role of evidence-based prevention, treatment and care” which focuses on the global dimensions of substance use interventions. The current session will focus specifically on the European context, and will look into the prevalence of substance use among migrant populations in the EU in addition to currently implemented interventions and caveats in research and practice. First, a review of prevalence and intervention studies in the EU will be presented based on a background paper prepared for the EMCDDA’s Social Responses Guide (presentation 1). Second, the much-debated topic of prevalence among refugees and other migrants in the EU context will be presented by means of population-based studies in Sweden (presentation 2) and Finland (presentation 3). Third, two presentations (4 & 5) will look into concrete practices for refugee populations identified in the SEMID-EU project (funded by the European Commission) and the BePrepared project targeting adolescent refugees in Germany. This symposium will identify the state of the art academic and policy-oriented literature concerning the prevalence of substance use among migrants populations and interventions for them in Europe.