The aim of the thesis is to study public opinion on social problems, with focus on the problems of alcohol- and drug abuse. Public opin-ion is studied through a sur-vey, distributed to a cross-sectional, ran-domised and represen-tative sample of the Swedish population, aged 18 to 69 years. The survey was distributed in spring 1995 (N=3 000). Apart from background questions, the survey contains questions on how respondents perceive different aspect of alcohol- and drug prob-lems and what should be done about them.

The theoretical perspective treats social problems as the result of collective de-fi-tio-nal processes, through which alcohol- and drug problems have been given diffe-rent cognitive and moral connotations. As a result, the problems have acquired objec-tive facticity. According to this perspective, reality is a social construction and reali-ty and soci-ety have a dual character of objective facticity and subjective mean-ing.

The term "public opinion" is discussed in the thesis. The conclu-sion drawn is that there is mainly two ways of understanding public opinion. In the first case, public conversation and debate is seen as a prereq-uisite to public opinion, which is comprehended as a group-based discur-sive phenomenon. In the second case, public opinion is equated with the results of opinion polls.

The results show that alcohol- and drug problems are perceived as serious social problems, though drug abuse is seen as more serious. Concerning drugs, the public perceptions are, to a large extent, unanimous. Drugs are dependency-generating, dangerous and should be forbidden. The punishment for drug-re-lated crimes should be more severe than today. Large parts of the respondents agree on all of this. Concerning alcohol, the results show greater differences between different groups of respondents. A majority of the women are less positive to alcohol than the men, and more in favour of alcohol re-strictions. The same goes for older people compared to younger. One central conclu-sion concerns the unamity in the percep-tion of drugs, while the perception of alcohol is much more varied. The low visibil-ity of groups expressing different views on the drug problem in public debate seems to be reflected in the results of the survey. The respon-dents’ perception of drugs is thus very much in line with official dis-course.