“Now binge drinking and addictive behaviours are the problem”

Set up by the FOPH, Infodrog is the Swiss Office for the Coordination of Addiction Facilities. With ten employees in total, we implement national pilot projects, organise specialist conferences and manage databases and websites such as Suchtindex.ch, a database of all the institutions providing inpatient and outpatient addiction support services in Switzerland plus self-help groups and parents’ associations. Our tasks have changed over the years. In the 1990s our main concern was to control problems relating to open drug scenes. We later also had to focus on other phenomena such as binge drinking and rave culture, which involved the use of new substances. Today still, the scope of our services is expanding all the time; we focus not just on illegal substances but on alcohol and addictive behaviours as well.

That’s right. Infodrog has been sponsored by the Swiss health foundation Radix since 2009. Radix receives payment from the FOPH for Infodrog’s services. The services we provide are mainly information and coordination activities that are often performed behind the scenes. When SafeZone.ch was developed, for example, the task was to get 25 different offices in 17 cantons in all the linguistic regions round one table and to network them in a national platform. The result was a portal for free, anonymous online advice on addiction-related questions for affected people and their friends and families. SafeZone.ch is a joint effort: Infodrog operates the platform and works with experts from local offices and from Germany to provide continuing training for the counsellors. The actual counselling is the responsibility of the cantons and is provided by the employees at each of the counselling centres.

In spite of restrictions and bans, people have been consuming substances with addictive potential for thousands of years. Our aim is to minimise the harm caused to the person affected and to society, and promote use that is as informed and low-risk as possible. This is why, for example, we compile the latest substance-related warnings issued by the drug-checking services in Zurich, Bern, Olten, Basel, Geneva and Lucerne. We also provide information in German, French and Italian on SafeZone.ch about unexpected and dangerous substances. One of the current topics is synthetic cannabinoids that are sprayed onto legally produced cannabis, known as CBD cannabis, after it has been produced. These illegally applied synthetic cannabinoids can result in serious side effects or high-risk overdoses.

For many years, prevention efforts concentrated on adolescents and school-aged children, one of the reasons being that school provides an easy way to reach a large part of the population. But we have come to realise that an addiction can occur at any age. And that many people are at risk of addiction after they retire or at an even later stage, when they move into a nursing home. This is why Infodrog works with associations in the fields of addiction and the elderly in order to develop a basis for better care of elderly people, for example as part of care concepts for retirement homes. What’s still missing, though, is specific offerings for middle-aged people, who are often under stress and whose attitudes to performance-enhancing substances and alcohol are sometimes problematic.

Digitalisation is affecting us more and more. It is bringing a lot of new requirements and challenges that we need to cope with, particularly in terms of data privacy. We are noticing a trend in counselling towards digital self-management and something called “blended counselling”; this comprises hybrid forms of counselling, combining online counselling with face-to-face conversations. There is major potential that is still far from being fully exploited.