Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere.
Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Every time a country goes through the process of debating whether to legalise gay marriage, there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society, or ruin the sanctity of marriage, or cause God to punish us.
However, legalising gay marriage in other countries hasn't caused the sky to fall. But anti-gay marriage people conveniently ignore this.
The same wilful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to Universal Healthcare, drug laws, minimum wages (for either raising or lowering/removing), criminal justice, firearms, and education.
Obviously countries are all different, but the general ideas are the same. For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is, however, an Australia or British-style "ban handguns and buy them back off owners" isn't going to work in America. But the same principle applies, less handguns = less deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Moore_sexual_abuse_allegat...
"No, he's not a pedaphile, he's a just sex offender"
Girls or Boys. Pedophilia is not gender specific.
He is also not accused of relations with a 22 year old. He is accused of assault. Difference being someone taking you out on a date, vs someone grabbing your junk and forcing themselves on/in you without your consent.
It seems to me that some of these discussions are mostly dominated by irrationality. This is particularly recognizable in the US, but also occurs in Europe to a degree that varies from topic to topic and country to country.
I believe there are two major factors at play. First, certain topics concern taboos that are still strong even in secularized societies. To these belong anything concerning human sexuality and some religious views. Second, certain topics have simply been hijacked by politicians, because they need positions that differentiate them from other politicians in a world in which most problems can and need be solved in a technical way. Criminal justice, gun laws, drug laws, healthcare, and climate change are such topics in the US. The discussion of these topics in the US barely makes any sense, because at least certain aspects of the problems related to them have perfectly objective solutions. But then US Democrats and Republicans would essentially defend the same policies and only differ on technical details, and that's not compatible with US election cycles.
A third 'problem' is perhaps a self-imposed and socially imposed limitation of freedom of speech that is particularly strong in developed humanist societies. What e.g. many US gun nuts really want to say is that the freedom of owning a gun outweighs the deaths by gun accidents and amok runs with guns, because freedom is such a high good and they like guns. A politician is not allowed to say that, however, and so the value ordering behind the policy is hidden behind insincere arguments that merely serve as a pretext. This happens everywhere, not just in the US, of course. I don't think this third issue is a problem, as it merely illustrates how evolved the societies are already. The social pressure is there for good reasons and fulfills an important role. (You don't want people starting rational arguments for introducing slavery, because it would lower their production costs. It's good when society endorses values that sanction such arguments even when they are purportedly rational.)
To make this clear, these phenomena occur everywhere in the Western industrialized world. Democratic politicians have run out of political positions, because most problems could be solved by experts and have one or more good technical solution.
(Note: In this post I mean 'technical' in the sense of τέχνη, as in 'technocracy', concerning instrumental means-end rationality.)
This is the problem when discussing political issues like gun control. Gun related crimes has shown correlation with gun ownership laws. Gun accidents is naturally correlated to gun ownership. Mass public shootings however do not when adjusted for the population, but it draws so much political attention so it always get put into the discussion regardless if it match the data.
Gun accidents is also a rather weak-ish argument for gun control. Accidental deaths and injured caused by guns is statistically unusual, and no where near the top for the population in general or kids specifically. As famously noted in the book freakonomics, swimming pools comes in a big second place directly after Motor vehicle accidents in accidental deaths. The best argument in my view being made for gun control based on accidents is a moral one, in that even some accidents is bad enough when the owners don't have any reason to own a gun.
Which leaves us with the parent comment and gun related crimes. Assault and robberies. Those are where gun control seems to have the strongest connection with the data, and where it would do the most good. People on the lower end of the social economical ladder getting shot by other people on the lower end of the social economical ladder. It is not flashy, its not a winning political platform, but its where the data points to. I would not call it irrationality, but rather human fallibility in focusing on the rare and extreme and not see the common.
Anyone who has dealt with depression can tell you how this works. The suicidal urge doesn't last very long, but guns are waaaaaaay too convenient. Guns are far from the only way to kill yourself, but their widespread availability and the immediacy of the action are unique among suicide methods.
The problem with politics is that you have a status quo from where you operate and you are massively constraint in the possible directions you can go. For example, you simply can not go against social security and things like that because the way these programs have been designed ensures that they are almost immortal.
I disagree with you that these easy technocratic solutions exists. There are fundamentally different positions that people can have and actually do have, I just think that whatever these positions are, they matter little because they are not reachable anyway.
I have another theory: people are very conservative and rational (with all its limitations) at the society level, doesn't matter if they came from the left or right, deep changes in society have unexpected consequences. It didn't happen with same marriage laws but can happen in many other sectors.
Thanks for dismissing myself, many of my friends, and many people who share my opinions, lord jonathanstrange. Such arguments aren't in bad faith at all, and quite the contrary, promote reasonable discussion where people are happy to take a verbal beating for their beliefs.
Implicit here is that when you say "experts", you mean people who share your terminal values and general way of thinking.
Your post makes it seem like you're having trouble stepping out of your value system to consider opposing views. Consider your quote here:
"certain topics concern taboos that are still strong even in secularized societies. To these belong anything concerning human sexuality and some religious views."
Apparently to you it's unthinkable that secular (e.g. leftist) viewpoints could also nurture irrational, destructive taboos and blind spots. But they absolutely do. Some of them are on display in your post.
You say, "most problems could be solved by experts". This is basically stating, "If I had absolute power all this could be solved easily." It's one of the impulses that leads to tyranny. This sort of thing has been tried; the world has seen many leftist technocracies, and it's been one of the most murderous political forces in human history. It's not a good line of thought.
The reality is that the solutions you imagine wouldn't actually work the way you imagine they would. Because your values aren't ultimately the best ones in any absolute sense. They're just yours, and like all humans, they're blinding you to critical aspects of the situation. This is why successful societies become successful not by concentrating power, but by spreading it. When power is spread, many values and perspectives are brought to bear, and we muddle through.
The technocratic, power concentrating, "If only I was king!" tyranny impulse needs to be rejected at every turn.
I'm not saying you shouldn't have any power; your values are valid and valuable. But you should continue to share that power.
Technocracy is tyranny is murder.
At most you can look at countries who listen to relevant experts, which very much includes the United States. Though again on a sliding scale and always secondary to maintaining power for the in groups.
Really if you look at the worst leaders of all time none of them are Technocrats. Joseph Stalin pure politician>Revolutionary , Hitler - Artist>Soldier>Politician. Pol pot failed out, built roads in Croatia then became a revolutionary. Mao Zedong > Politician/Revolutionary. Augusto Pinochet > Military. Leopold II of Belgium > Prince > King.
Karl Marx for example may have qualified and is tied to Socialism, but never gained power.
The two are nowhere near synonymous.
Implicit here is that when you say "experts", you mean people who share your terminal values and general way of thinking.
No, I'm really thinking about experts in the technical sense, based on instrumental rationality. Think of panels of domain experts from all political sides and how they can agree on a solution. And yes, they often can agree on a solution - or at least could - if they put their own political agenda to the side for a moment.
Your post makes it seem like you're having trouble stepping out of your value system to consider opposing views.
That's an unfair and unwarrented assumption. I have no problems stepping outside of my value system. I have no troubles understanding e.g. ISIS, social darwinists, very right wing positions, libertarians, etc. and have had discussions with all of these except members of ISIS.
You say, "most problems could be solved by experts". This is basically stating, "If I had absolute power all this could be solved easily."
If there is a meaningful relation between those two statements, you certainly haven't made it explicit. The experts in question can be as conservative as you like, if that appeases your mind - as long as they are able to distinguish between their own values and expert opinion about technical issues.
The reality is that the solutions you imagine wouldn't actually work the way you imagine they would. Because your values aren't ultimately the best ones in any absolute sense.
There are two claims here. The first one is empirical, and since I haven't discussed any particular solutions we can ignore this issue. The second one concerns the role of values. My claim is that the solution of most problems in modern societies has not much to do with values, but mostly will be based on technical issues aka means-end rationality. Not all of them, there is plenty of room for different values and democratic equilibrium between those. You're ignoring my central claim and don't back up your opinion.
The technocratic, power concentrating, "If only I was king!" tyranny impulse needs to be rejected at every turn.
I would consider myself an expert on the interplay between abstract values and technical rationality, as I'm currently leading a research project on this topic, but I'm decidedly not an expert in any of the domains that are relevant for the problems mentioned in my post. So your (personal?) critique seems off-topic. If I would be king that would probably be fairly bad for my country (although perhaps not so much if I'd listen to experts).
When I'm talking about experts I'm literally talking about professors with a high reputation among their colleagues and a proven track record of 40 years of peer reviewed publication in their domain who converge in expert panels to come up with solutions to given problems in some democratically legitimized way and who are not chosen on the basis of their beliefs or political views. Not about random people on social media or electrical engineers who debunk General Relativity or climate science.
Technocracy is tyranny is murder.
I used to think that in less drastic terms, too, but have changed my mind. Modern problems, especially their economic aspects, have become too complex for basic democracy and some strongly representational mechanisms are needed for democracy to work. Technocracy does not imply tyranny as long as proper division of power mechanisms are in place. (Whether the division of power is good enough in country X is another question and certainly debatable for some countries.)
And nobody needs absolute power to do that. They just need to discuss reasonably amongst themselves and decide on a course of measurable action and re-evaluate down the road to ensure the desired effect was reached.
But yeah, I suspect you don't listen well to reasonable arguments, likely because you're too busy pretending words can't be pinned to specific definitions for the purposes of productive discussion.
There's slightly older (2009) systemic review of Portugal's drug policy and it's effects available at: https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decrimina... which is also interesting and has fair bit of stats to back the discussion up with.
But that's just a talking point. It's like saying if there are less silver cars, there are less car accidents involving silver cars. That doesn't tell you anything about whether it makes sense to ban silver cars. You can insert literally anything into that sentence and it's still true. If there is less food, less people will get food poisoning. If there is less water, less people will drown in water.
It doesn't prove anything, it's just sophistry. We obviously shouldn't ban water, which implies the question of whether we should ban guns is more complicated than that.
Also, there isn't a National Silver Car Association that is influencing Congress to block research into silver car related deaths.
They are not. If people who like silver cars had to drive white cars instead, life would go on and there would still be less accidents involving silver cars. That there would then be more accidents involving white cars might be a relevant factor the talking point glosses over, however.
Even food could in theory be replaced with IV nutrition. But there are countervailing advantages to actual food that aren't taken into consideration by the simplistic logic of food poisoning is bad, therefore ban food.
And we can't do without water, but we can, for example, require swimming pools to have fences, which would reduce the amount of drowning without prohibiting water at all.
But the point is that they aren't even examples. You can use that "logic" against literally anything, which makes it obviously flawed. If there were less puppies then less puppies would bite people. That doesn't mean we should ban puppies.
> Also, there isn't a National Silver Car Association that is influencing Congress to block research into silver car related deaths.
There also isn't a Campaign to End Silver Car Accidents trying to get Congress to fund research into silver car accidents that only produces the raw numbers without accounting for things like the independent trend for reduction in accident fatality rates over time when measuring the effects of a silver car ban, substitution effects, the fact that there are more silver cars than red cars when comparing the accident numbers, etc.
Opponents of gay marriage want strong families with good environments to raise children.
Opponents of drug legalization want to prevent the individual and societal harm caused by drug use.
Viewing opponents with that perspective helps find more effective ways of working together.
It's also interesting that advocates for those "liberal" items want to get the government out of individual choices, which is the same goal cited by "conservatives" against centralized health care/education, etc.
Otherwise every decision would just be made through a review of data and only the first country to make a massive change would be venturing into the unknown while everyone else could simply observe what happens and decide to follow suit if the outcome is favorable.
Being in the US you see identity politics quite clearly. People simply vote by who supports abortion and who doesn't. To them the rest of the platform doesn't matter, but this one issue is so critical that they simply look at it alone and nothing else.
If you look at many of the votes on key issues you will notice that they aren't passed 90 to 10, they are usually 55 to 45, if you are lucky, or even closer. Given how close these votes are it's a surprise anything ever changes at all.
I agree that the debate often ignored existence proofs, but... It can be hard to take this a whole lot further.
The Aussie gun example is used mostly because the narrative fits. The Tassie shooting leading to a buyback. But, there are lots of counties with all sorts of policies and realities. Which to compare to? Details can matter, as can all sorts of context.
Like any-friggin-one! You had to compare to bottom of the barrel to find a country that has the worse situation with guns than US.
There are a lot of places where civilian gun ownership causes problems, gun crime, etc. Some of the places where it does not cause big problems (eg Switzerland) have liberal gun laws and high ownership rates.
There are examples where widespread gun ownership/availability causes exactly the kinds of is "problems" that (according to some) the American founders intended it to cause. Basically, armed revolutions.
There are confusing examples where laws are liberal but ownership is rare. There are opposite examples.
I'm not saying ignore all this. If you want to learn about policy areas, you need to study examples. Just beware the anecdote, attributing cause and effect. Beware within heated political debates, they are known to cause insanity. There is rarely some objective fact that proves your argument, just a collection of facts that may, taken in context, convince you.
Back to drugs policy, Portugal had its own set of cultural norms, problems they were trying to solve, political considerations...
I think Mexico and some other big transit countries need to look at radical liberalisation options. Portugal is a good guide for some of their issues, but overall their situation is very different. They have nasty problems with the wholesale dealing, and the organized crime that goes with it. The street level crime and consumption is not their biggest problem, like Portugal.
And then we get into the practicalities and the politics!
In order to have strict gun control you first need strict border control.
Yet the group that wants strict gun control is strongly opposed to strict border control.
From the article:
> It had become clear to a growing number of practitioners that the most effective response to addiction had to be personal, and rooted in communities. Treatment was still small-scale, local and largely ad hoc.
> after 10 years of running the CAT in Faro, Goulão was invited to help design and lead a national drug strategy.
It seems to me this is really important. You can't just decriminalize drugs on a national level and expect things to improve on their own. These CATs were around for over a decade and seemed a large part of the success.
There is something to your point regardless, but moral disparities do not proportionately account for the disparities here. The situations are more complicated. The political types of topics which seem to suffer here are laden with some impurity with considering. Many cultural and moral values shift like the wind, so why do political concerns seem so immutable? I think we would be fools to accept this as simply a moral disparity. I encourage considering a more complex model of social relations. The more significant influences at play here are symbolism, identity and politics.
The right to not be a slave is a moral right. That's literally the definition of a right. First entry from Google's dictionary:
> morally good, justified, or acceptable.
https://www.skepticink.com/humanisticas/2013/03/23/is-the-io...
I agree with that. It has been very illuminating for me to watch how large groups of people get to consensus. Whether it is something like women wearing pants or if it is ok to smoke cigarettes in a restaurant. My interest has been that sometimes, when one is a part of a larger group, one might want the group to change to a new consensus.
As the article points out, there is a certain amount of collective pain that has to be experienced before you can motivate a critical mass of the group to switch to a new point of view. I wonder if the opioid crisis that is afflicting the US has inflicted that much pain yet.
It's likely a large cohort of Trumps voters were those who were incensed by "central government interfering in local affairs", in particular the case of Kim Davis springs to mind.
Never mind that Trump doesn't exactly embody conservatism, I'd imagine a large amount of conservative voters, alarmed by social progress would have voted him out of spite.
Of course, now I like to think that the current wave of high-profile sexual impropriety cases is similarly a sparked by the more socially liberal sectors of society against the misogyny embodied by Trump and the socially conservative segments.
Most conservatives are driven almost entirely by spite:
http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/29/17971903-to-figh...
>When the more expensive CFLs were sold without environmental messaging — but touted the fact that CFLs last 9,000 hours longer than the less expensive incandescent bulbs and reduce energy costs by 75 percent — more conservatives bought them.
>The ideological divide was strongest when energy efficiency was tied to the environmental message of reducing carbon emissions.
See also: the entire concept of "rolling coal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal).
What? Pretty much every harasser and rapist revealed recently has been a moderate-to-active liberal. Weinstein himself gave generously to Hillary.
How do you spin this as righteous leftists getting rid of those bad conservatives when all the perps are full-throated leftist donors, activists, and supporters? I'm sorry but this strikes me as just surreal.
Well, just look at the US. Political correctness is getting totally out of hand and the same is happening more and more in European countries.
Changing traditions causes a lot of entitlement in people who also feel that they should get a special treatment and it seems that there's no end to it. In a democratic society, entitlement from small groups is a societal cancer.
And equal legal partnership rights aren't even good enough for many. They absolutely need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning for hundreds of years. It's like these people intentionally try to cause trouble and I can understand why others don't want any of it.
By the way - last time I looked into this, marriage predates organised religion, and definitely predates Christianity. If your intention is to maintain a Christian country to the detriment of those following other religions or none at all, at least be honest about it.
Come back when lynch mobs have literally hanged thousands of people for being politically incorrect. Or when millions of people are being systemically disenfranchised because they're politically incorrect. Or when a US president is about to trigger a nuclear war over "political correctness".
Heck, it is quite entitled for people to think that they inherently deserve privileges that others are denied simply because "that is how it has always been". Bullheaded traditionalism is the actual cancer.
I'd hardly call gay marriage 'special treatment'. It's the opposite: equal treatment. In that regard it's fundamentally different from, say, mandatory wheelchair-access laws.
> They absolutely need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning for hundreds of years.
The emotional baggage of religious conservatives isn't reason enough to deny gay couples an equal right to be officially partnered in the eyes of the law. 'Equal' includes the name of the arrangement.
I think the biggest sign that this isnt actually true is that marriage exists in countries across many different religions. That to me indicates that although religion has practices for marriage, marriage itself does not belong to religion. Its almost like a super/subset thing.
Because that's what it called?
You wrote above that entitlement of minorities is cancer. Isn't limiting marriage based on sex just such a cancer? Most of all, sexual desires and even biological structure isn't binary.
It's not being overly liberal, it's being non-discriminatory.
The key here is 'a binding contract between individuals'.
The 'gayness is evil' trope is not fundamental to even western civilization. It was totally ok to be gay in ancient greece.
Yes, because that's equality.
We've tried "separate but equal" before, haven't we? It doesn't work out, and it's used as an excuse for continuing discrimination.
This is not entitlement, it's equal treatment.
This does not follow. Take Brazil for example. 60k homicides per year, and guns are pretty much forbidden.
Of course, criminals don’t seem to care.
Brazil compared to US is so poor and with shitty corrupted police. US police prides itself on being the best most sophisticated in the world i dont se a reason why they would have problems doing same job as police in europe. They would have it in fact much easier.
Also the fact that Brazil has gun problems even when guns are prohibited does not mean that it would be better if they were allowed and everyone would carry one. What is this logic wtf.
A proof by contradiction only requires one single example.
> Brazil compared to US is so poor and with shitty corrupted police
That's true but completely unrelated to gun ownership. The police has to deal with people who don't care about gun ownership laws.
> Also the fact that Brazil has gun problems even when guns are prohibited does not mean that it would be better if they were allowed and everyone would carry one. What is this logic wtf.
Criminals can be absolutely sure that citizens won't be able to protect themselves.
If the ban didn't actually lessen the number of handguns, then we don't have the left hand side of the implication! These are two things:
ban on handguns -> less handguns
less handguns -> fewer deaths
Someone argued that the second is true, and you seem to refute it by saying the first isn't. So maybe you aren't talking about the same thing. I'm going to argue that the second thing isn't controversial. What's difficult and possibly controversial is whether item #1 is possible in Brazil, or the US (where guns are already common).
My take on it is this:
stricter laws + wait 2 or 3 generations -> fewer guns.
fewer guns -> fewer deaths.
It's interesting to me that a lot progressive, popular armchair analysis of the issue advocates for strict gun laws, and at the same time advocates for loose drug laws. What are the inherent differences between both problems that most people use to reconcile the cognitive dissonance?
The USA has a homicide rate of 4.88 per 100,000. of which 3.60 are from firearms.
It's also interesting to note that the USA has the highest homicide rate of all "first world" nations, trailing close behind wonderful places like Kyrgyzstan and Somalia. The next highest "first world" nation, Canada, is 1.68 (1/3 of the USA), of which 0.38 are from firearms.
The USA has the most lax firearm laws of the three I mentioned, and also has a high proportion of homicides perpetrated using firearms. Canada has somewhat stricter laws and a considerably lower rate from firearms. Brazil has extreme gun control, but still a very high rate from firearms.
The link between gun control and violence seems inconclusive to me. However, the base propensity for violence is definitely tied to the culture.
Accidental gun deaths will however drop by a lot. Thousands of people die every year from that (including 1300 children according to a random headline I quickly googled). These are silly and preventable deaths.
Most importantly we have strict storage laws (you can't drive around with a gun in your car every day, you can't have a gun in next to your bed etc- you have guns in your gun safe, period).
And the reason behind why all this works is because there is a broad acceptance that a gun is a hunting tool or sports equipment, not a tool for self defense, nor a tool for ensuring that government stays in line (we use pitchforks and cobblestone for that).
Gun laws are both the cause and effect of such a mentality. You can't have strict gun laws in a place where people believe guns are essential for self defense and defense of democracy. And vice versa. For the US to end up with sane (yes) gun laws, the water needs to be slowly heated. Generations of tightened gun laws, amnesties etc. Just starting with a ban on just a few types of weapons + adding safe storage requirements would go a long way.
Finland, Norway, Austria, France, Iceland, Germany, Switzerland - seven of the top 20 nations when it comes to guns per capita.
It's the nature of the gun laws, not the forbidden or not forbidden aspect, that plays a far larger role.
This is in EU country and I believe quite a few other countries are on similar level.
Suddenly, the "Christians" are trying to elect a pedophile to US Senate. Coincidence? I think not.
Who has the pool on when they try to elect on Congressman with a bestiality tape?
<Yes, /s, just in case someone can't figure it out ...>
(More violent knife crime, though. This goes ignored by the anti-gun nuts.)
These issues aren’t as simple as you might imply. The demographics of Sweden are different than those of Chicago or Matamoros. Conroe, Texas has very high gun ownership and very low violent crime. New York has very low gun ownership and relatively low violent crime.
Cancer death rates are higher in the UK compared to the US despite “universal” healthcare in the UK.
It’s naïve to draw simplistic cause-effect conclusions and it’s intellectually dishonest to suggest that policies that work in Lisbon would work at a similar level of success in Los Angeles.
To be clear, I am all for decriminalization of drugs, however suggesting that policies will have similar effects in different regions or countries is to ignore the thousands of other variables at play.
> Gun ownership was a significant predictor of firearm homicide rates (incidence rate ratio = 1.009; 95% confidence interval = 1.004, 1.014). This model indicated that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership, the firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%.
Firearms ownership rate doesn't correlate directly to firearms crime rates, but the change in ownership does.
Secondly, this research looks only on guns vs. homicides, I would say that there could be a few other factors that might be more stronger then guns (poverty level, drugs abuse level, local society structure, etc.) - this is speculation, but I don't see that researches even looked on possible other factors that can potentially explain higer/lower homicide rate.
Effect: More people get cancer
On the flip side, Denmark has the highest cancer rate, so they must be doing something wrong.
The alternative explanation is that people in Mexico generally die before they can get cancer.
---
Crime has seen a huge increase in Britain and it appears set to keep getting worse. Crime in London has increased dramatically. I'm not going to claim that's due to gun laws, however it is factually correct that crime is surging big time.
Acid attacks alone have skyrocketed in the last three years in London, tripling in that time to around 500 annually.
Jul 2017
"Police record 10% rise in crime in England and Wales, with 18% increase in violent crime and significant rise in murder rate"
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-fig...
April 2017
"Gun crime offences in London surged by 42% in the last year, according to official statistics. The Met Police's figures showed there were 2,544 gun crime offences from April 2016 to April 2017 compared to 1,793 offences from 2015 until 2016."
"Knife crime also increased by 24% with 12,074 recorded offences from 2016 to 2017."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-39578500
Oct 2017
"Violent crime soars by fifth as total offences recorded by police push past five million. ... The data, published by the Office for National Statistics, showed the number of violence against the person crimes logged by police went up by a fifth (19 per cent) to 1.2 million."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/london-now-danger...
Unfortunately that's an exaggerated claim. The world is still extraordinarily backwards when it comes to gay marriage. 70% of European nations for example don't allow gay marriage. About 90% of the world's population live in a nation where gay marriage is not yet legalized.
Only a little over two dozen nations allow it, out of ~195.
More than 80% of EU population is living in a country where either gay marriage or civil unions (which are pretty close) are legal.
The Australia and British laws and results are evidence that is plain in front of you. Those are humans on a different piece of land on our planet that on a whole have less gun violence occurring because there are less guns.
You can talk about culture, how it wouldn't work, etc. but that is the exact point the parent comment is making.
It would be nice if the US would let the CDC do in-depth studies of this nature, but gun lobbyists have blocked this from happening.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm...
The expansion of maintenance access, both to suboxone and methadone clinics, safe injection sites, needle exchanges and other hard decisions are going to need to be made more quickly than usual to stem the tide.
Harm reduction works, prohibition doesn't.
[edit] the graph came out looking like this https://twitter.com/73rhodes/status/915604039873769472
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20151008/NEWS02/15100...
The question is why Chicago has problems with organised violence and other places don't to the same degree. I think if you look into it, the reasons are significantly more complex than "one place has more legal guns" - the data for that hypothesis doesn't make sense when plotted on a chart.
That's called being a sovereign state. Else we'll just all adopt some universal law (of course everybody imagines this law to be one they like. Would you be OK if it was based on Swedish or Saudi Arabian or Guatemalan law?)
Just because "it's done elsewhere" doesn't mean you should do it to, or that it's compatible with your preferences and standards and so on, or with how you want life to be.
I think it's a horrible example in this context, because you can't compare being gay to being a drug abuser. One of them is nature, the other is nurture (at least, that's what research says, people are still debating though).
Also, you can't measure "corruption of society, or ruin the sanctity of marriage, or cause God to punish us", since they're all populist statements. The benefits of Portugal's drug policy are measurable however.
And more of the society will crumble sorts of bits.
It really doesn't matter if there are benefits or not in other countries, just like it doesn't matter if legal gay marriage hasn't doomed other countries. Facts aren't an issue in these sorts of disagreements, unfortunately.
It's obviously quite a good deal for politicians. They get political victories by whipping a minority that can't fight back, and by stirring up angst among the ignorant. They also fuel the prison industrial complex, which I increasingly believe is a thing.
My two cents.
It's much easier to double down on it.
[1] http://www.rmhidta.org/html/FINAL%20NSDUH%20Results-%20Jan%2...
1. Marijuana has been researched extensively and its health effects are at worst similar to alcohol, at best significantly less bad for you. In that context it makes sense to think of marijuana as a consumer product, and it makes sense that requiring a consumer product be sold in a dangerous and unregulated way would reduce demand for that product. Under these conditions we can expect legalization to increase demand, and it has.
2. Portugal's policy is decriminalization not legalization, and its success has not really been about soft drugs, it's been about hard drugs. People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently for the same reason people without mental illness do not drink bleach: it's bad for you and if you care about yourself self-preservation is important. Portugal's solution is about the people who don't or are unable to care for themselves, and recognizing that the drug use is a symptom of that, and that you cannot fix the underlying mental issue by putting people in cages. Their solution is not "stop doing anything and fully legalize," it's "require people to be treated" instead of "require people to sit in a cage." Under these conditions we can expect decriminalization to decrease demand, and it has.
Edit: Also, I do very much agree with your larger point re: overconsumption, and I'm not saying we should ignore that problem either. Mental health in this country is a disaster, I just don't think putting people in cages is the solution.
Number "2" adds useful distinctions regarding the Portugese approach, but I don't think there is any basis for your statement that "People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently". This is tautologically true if you define addiction as mental illness, but would you really claim that no one regularly uses heroin because they became addicted to after starting with prescription painkillers, rather that they use it regularly only because they have an underlying non-drug related mental illness?
I think the thing OP's post was missing is that the distinction is important: we wouldn't expect the same trend to carry over to things that are not "benign," like hard drugs.
> This is tautologically true if you define addiction as mental illness, but would you really claim that no one regularly uses heroin because they became addicted to after starting with prescription painkillers, rather that they use it regularly only because they have an underlying non-drug related mental illness?
So, yes, this does happen, but no I don't think it's really a significant cause of drug addiction in the United States: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/a3z98b/big-pharma-didnt...
Otherwise, yes, I am arguing the vast majority (or maybe all?) people who are drug addicts have some underlying mental illness, and I don't disagree that is tautological: that's kind of the point. Truthfully I don't think we have the data but I also wouldn't be shocked to see a large portion of the people who become addicted to prescribed painkillers and then end up using heroin afterwards come into the injury and prescription with some kind of mental illness which predisposes them to addiction. Ie: you are a construction worker, you are depressed, you hurt your back, you get on painkillers and it escalates from there. But the vast majority of people prescribed these drugs do not become addicted to them and I think that's telling.
But really, that doesn't matter to me, the only thing I'm really looking for is a classification of people who are addicts, however they got that way, as "sick" instead of as "criminals." Again: let's not put people in cages unless we absolutely have to.
Which brings me to the other distinction number 2 adds which is that Portugal's approach is decriminalization not legalization, like with Colorado and marijuana.
So there are at least two distinct ways in which the Colorado Marijuana situation don't apply.
Instead of forcing them to hide, prosecuting, incarcerating and labeling them as undesirable members of society, you can create infrastructure and programs that could help many of them deal with their issues over time.
Sometimes the hardest part of exiting addiction is that the only people who understand or tolerate you are other addicts, creating a very hard to escape circle.
What happened to the overall DUI rates, though?
While hard drugs will never be good for you as such, we can do a lot to reduce the consequences of taking them by ensuring addicts have access to drugs of farmaceutical quality.
A legal dealer/grower is expected to follow certain laws and provide a safe product. In return for a high demand product they have to follow licensing rules and have a safe product.
An illegal dealer has the incentive to make as much money as fast as possible because of the risk of future prosecution. It is more beneficial for the illegal dealer to switch you from $100 of weed per month to $2000 worth of heroin per month. It has a much worse health outcome for you, but a better financial outcome for them.
I would expect drug usage to increase when legalized.
It feels kind of awkward to try to ban cigarette while promoting cocaine use at the same time.
That being said as a libertarian I am of the opinion that it’s not for the state to tell people how to live their life, and if they aspire to become junkies, let them live.
Isn't that a desirable thing from a government standpoint? More tax income from legal sales? The point to legalize something is that you put some controls in place to know where and how, and at what quality it's being sold, not to have its consumption decrease.
'Numerous accounts say that "marijuana" came into popular usage in the U.S. in the early 20th century because anti-cannabis factions wanted to underscore the drug's "Mexican-ness."' [1]
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/07/14/201981025...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
https://www.counterpunch.org/2009/02/06/the-opium-exclusion-...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jun/05/singap... [2] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24428567
Hmm. Perhaps it's not as simple as "if it works here, it will work there."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_for_drug_tr...
When selling is legal is when organized crime leaves the picture, taxes can be collected, product is clean and measured and of quality.
Both sides of the equation are important to legalize, doing one without the other means huge problems remain.
The Portuguese doctor Goulão who leads most of the drug panels does want to legalise all drugs. He makes the argument that all drugs should be legalised not just baby steps of cannabis, so he definitely agrees with you.
What Portugal has achieved is amazing because they also had very conservative governments and yet still got as far as decriminalisation.
Other options that, in my amateur opinion, would be better, would be to more heavily penalise adultered drugs, or to have pharmacies supply, with a prescription, addictive drugs, but only to addicts. The latter idea is basically an extension of safe injection clinics.
Neuropharmacologist David Nutt, MD, of Imperial College London, and colleagues rated 20 different drugs on a scale that takes into account the various harms caused by a drug. Drugs are rated on nine harms a drug causes an individual and seven harms a drug causes society.
The scale, developed by a panel of experts called the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ICSD), ranges from 0 (no harm) to 100 (greatest possible harm). It is weighted so that a drug that scores 50 is half as harmful as a drug that scores 100.
"The highest and lowest overall harm scores … are 72 for alcohol and 5 for mushrooms," Nutt and colleagues calculate. "The ICSD scores lend support to the widely accepted view that alcohol is an extremely harmful drug both to users and to society
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20101101/...
And while I know US has an opioid crisis this prescription thing seems to work here.
¹As defined in the law, but prosecutors and judges can and often do avoid charging people with crimes if they have a bit more and there's no evidence of trafficking.
To be noted is when is it more useful to decriminalise, compared to conventional methods? I would say there is a point, say 5% or 10% population already users when it becomes more beneficial to decriminalise. This works because most of the society has already seen the problems associated with drug use. Anything before that (say 0.1% of population are users) and you may end up encouraging non-users since the legalisation may be seen as a form of approval from the state that there is nothing wrong with drug use.
It doesn't surprise me that many countries will be very slow to change. Change would require citizens to invest in understanding the research and to recognize that the "obvious" solutions to drug addiction aren't necessarily the effective ones.
Take smoking for example. Even if tabacco its alowed, its really expensive to buy legalized cigarrets.
So peoplo just smoke cheap ones, that enter from Paraguai border, with no quality control, and brougth in Brazil by organized crime, or even produced in clandestine factories.
Just legalizing everything here wold not make a diference.
The point is to NOT treat it as a business, but to treat it as a treatment distribution. You still charge patients for the consumption but you have to lower the production and distribution costs to the point of destroying the ilegal production/distribution and the para-national organizations behind it.
So, like most things government does, intervention with good intentions creates more problems. IMO, government should not interfere with it, and smokers should not get cheap health insurance (or none from government).
Source: https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/economia/2014/07/04/intern...
Arguably, Portugal doesn't have much control either. They can control their ports but there are no checks of anyone entering from Spain by car and airport security isn't as tight in passport-free Europe as would be intercontinental flights.
Brazil has 15735 km of land frontier with the biggest cocaine and marijuana producers in the world.
The CIA learned this all the way back in its OSS days from the Brits who have been doing it since before the first opium wars in China, the scars of which which can still be seen to this day. It doesn't matter the black market (prohibition for example) just that you control it.
Well, there's the current POTUS...
TFA touches on this, and I'd suggest that any in-depth, thoughtfully written piece on this subject would necessarily consider the complexities and cultural differences from one place to another -- especially if they're considering the question 'Why isn't this happening / why doesn't this work elsewhere?'.
But often the answer to that question is well understood (the HN comments now - half an hour in - are somewhere on the cynical to pragmatic part of the spectrum) and also understood is why the problem is difficult, if not intractable. Apropos, from TFA:
"But if conservative, isolationist, Catholic Portugal could transform into a country where same-sex marriage and abortion are legal, and where drug use is decriminalised, a broader shift in attitudes seems possible elsewhere."
This is an optimistic sentiment from a social attitudes POV, but misses the financial incentives within the USA (for example) of retaining the current arrangement.
Laws come from culture but culture and attitudes also comes from laws.
I agree these complexities can't be ignored, but when I argue (perhaps less bluntly) that e.g. "The US should just ban handguns and implement single payer healthcare because it obviously works everywhere else"
Then what I mean is that with stricter gun laws, perhaps the culture and attitudes surrounding guns can be slowly changed. I'm not saying "if you change gun laws you'll see a positive effect on gun deaths within 5 years". I'm arguing that if the US changes gun laws perhaps there will be significant improvement in (just!) a couple of generations.
And those counties can also revert to the old policy in less time than it takes to convince an entire country to repeal bad policy.
We've made big changes in the past that turned out to be the wrong thing and it takes many years to correct. Prohibition, for example.
Or deciding the entire country is going to allow leaded gasoline, instead of allowing cities like Philadelphia to ban it. It took another SEVENTY TWO YEARS to finally get it banned.
Marijuana is still officially illegal, coffeeshops cannot run a 100% legal business and small growers have been systematically persecuted. Only big, criminally run enterprises remain with the typical organized crime problems as a result.
It's no longer legal to amphetamines-related drugs at electronic parties and related drug-related deaths because of too strong or impure XTC are on a rise. Magic mushrooms are banned from sale because some tourists in Amsterdam had bad trips. And there was this story about a man slaughtering his dog that was awfully similar to those Marijuana stories in the 20's: https://www.expatica.com/nl/news/country-news/Man-kills-dog-..., amongst other "sudden" mushroom scare stories in the press.
Although because of lack of actual knowledge about these kind of substances allowed the sale of magic truffels to continue everywhere where before the mushrooms were sold, the magic mushroom scare stories in the media suddenly stopped.
It really saddens me that even more successful and better regulated policies from other countries are not followed in The Netherlands.
Much of the world might copy it. It's not going to get copied overnight, that's not how big change occurs in a culture. Portugal was culturally ready for it. Things like this always start very slowly and then gain momentum.
The US might even copy it given enough time, it will probably take two decades though. The US notoriously tends to slowly get around to things (although it did legalize gay marriage before ~96% of the rest of the planet). It goes back to the old joke about the US trying everything else first before finally doing the right thing, it's a partially accurate assessment of US history.
^ powerful stuff
I'd like to see drug use legalized (not "decriminalized") in the US, and I'd also like to see distribution handled by regulated retailers, so potency and quality are uniform.
Decrease the demand and the rest of the system will decrease on its own.
> While drug-related death, incarceration and infection rates plummeted, the country still had to deal with the health complications of long-term problematic drug use.
How about the number of people living sober lives? That seems like at least as important a number.
And to what extent is the continued illegality of selling drugs in Portugal keeping people away from drugs by virtue of wanting to avoid the shady characters who sell them? It seems likely that true legalization would lead to a massive increase in usage.
Let's take a hypothetical. Do you prefer a society where 30% have drug problems damaging themselves and their families, but there are very few overdose deaths and diseases among that 30%? Or one in which only 5% have drug problems, but there many more deaths and diseases among that 5%? I don't think there's an obviously right choice.
Ideally we can thread the needle and lower drug usage in addition to reducing the harms associated with it. That's the trillion dollar policy question and I don't think anyone has solved it yet.
And yes, the UNGASS is a big part of the problem, it sets the international direction and it only meets every 10 years. When it does meet it puts out a statement, and these statements so far have been utterly silent on any and all harm reduction measures, instead sticking to the old rhetoric about prevention and enforcement.
This is a TED talk from Gabor Mate, a physician that works with drug addicts. The highlights from his perspective are:
- Simple activities like watching television, gambling and shopping can be addictive, but most people will not develop an addition to them.
- The most addictive drugs act on the dopamine and endorphin systems. The people developing the strongest addictions happen to be people that do not produce enough of their dopamine or endorphines so once they feel better than a regular person when consuming them externally.
Than, came in politics and the "war on drugs" that really was a war against the consumers. First of Chinese people, than on colored people and than ...
If you really want to fight a "war on drugs", fight the reasons, that let people start taking those things .... but that might cost some money on social projects ... and will give no big corporations money for building prisons.
At least in the U.S, we thrive on _treating_ versus curing, plus , didn't you know if you fall on hard times medically especially with anything related to addiction or mental health, you have to bootstrap yourself up from your own bootstraps or go to a 5k a week rehab facility that does not accept insurance.
If drugs are legal in the U.S, who is going to pay all those private jail/prison owners excutive salaries? Where are those corporations going to get the slave labor?
Who is going to pay all those police officers all those raises for keeping drugs off the street?
How are alcohol and tobacco companies supposed to find new consumers whose lives are ruined for possession of marijuana who are unable to secure any form of higher level of employment( extremely difficult) because they were arrested for carrying marijuana.
That's why the United States has not copied it.
They almost certainly are tiny things with very small marginal contributions when countries as varied as Russia, Australia, Sweden, Poland, Singapore, and Switzerland -- who don't have of the factors you mention -- also have failed to follow Portugal's innovation.
Switzerland in fact has a system very similar to what is described in this article. Methadone (and even in some cases heroin) is readily dispensed to those in need. You aren't going to end up with a 10 year sentence for possessing hard drugs, you'll be helped.
My point isn't that "countries all treat things exactly the same". My point is that the OP's alleged reasons don't really hold up once you abandon a myopic US-centric view and actually look at other countries.
The conditions to enter those programs are rather strict. Depending on age, attempts to kick the habit and other factors.
That said. I'd say that the program is very successful for two main reasons:
It massively raises the health of the addicts and lets them actually conduct a normal life despite being addicted.
It also totally changed the image of the drug from something around hero mystique (as it had in the 80s and partially 90s) to a total loser drug. While there certainly still is a problem for a lot of addicts uptake has seriously declined.
The fate of all middle ground positions. (Not to be confused with compromises, that are far too often the combination of the worst of each, because that somehow seems to help both sides to save face)
Decriminalization would probably cause the same uptick in usage as legalization would, but unlike legalization, it wouldn't make drug use less devastating to people's lives.
But I do not agree with that "same uptick as legalization": when people don't start, they don't start because of fear of getting hooked, not because of fear of getting caught. Legalization comes with a much stronger "if it's not forbidden it can't be that dangerous" subtext than just decriminalization. The only real disadvantage of decriminalization is that you lose the occasional successful withdrawal after a "punishment or treatment, your choice" deal (happens all the time in a de facto but not de jure decriminalization environment), but since that is only the second best way to start withdrawal, maybe it is not much of a loss since it allows to focus resources on those who want to stop on their own initiative. (But in my experience with addicts, they all kind of wanted to stop and kind of did not, all the time, so there is always a base for external "inspiration" to work with)
I find it really absurd when newspapers attribute societal changes to single policies. The guard is so intellectually dishonest.
This obviously has nothing to do with the crisis.
> Portugal’s remarkable recovery, and the fact that it has held steady through several changes in government – including conservative leaders who would have preferred to return to the US-style war on drugs – could not have happened without an enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction – and itself. In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies and around kitchen tables across the country.
Intellectual dishonesty seems to be on your side, this time.
- Aldous Huxley
The article has a clear focus on heroin and meth (drug usage that can be associated with the sharing of needles) and not so much worried about Marijuana.
Also, for those who may not know, just because you legalize a drug doesn't mean druggies will be in the workforce. Just because a drug is legal doesn't mean a company has to hire someone that does the drug. For example, I had my medical marijuana card in California, however, companies still denied me jobs when the pee came back dirty.
No, we shouldn't copy Portugal's drug policies.
America isn't desperate enough, or brave enough, to try.
0. Military Indu$trial Complex
1. Moral-panicking Christian sociopaths hate poor people
Pointing a finger at a single group is unproductive when the desired outcome is a more comprehensively understanding, less punitive, and essentially more humanitarian solution for what is at issue.
The real disconnect is that the people in power are not held to the same standard as those being sentenced. When was the last time you heard of a prosecuting attorney being drug tested before they could argue in court? What about a judge, or probation/parole/police officer? If there was some transparency in how ubiquitous drug use actually is, one might have some real leverage when seeking to implement more equitable (and therefore less punitive) legislation that provides fairer sentencing guidelines.
This is precisely what's happening in the Philippines, a predominantly Christian nation, and very devoutly so.
The article unfortunately does not touch on the stance of the religious community of Portugal and how it was (or was not) handled, something which could hold important lessons for similar efforts in the US.
US drug policy is incredibly effective at the things it is designed to do,which are keeping prisons full and police budgets enormous. Why would we change a policy which is already perfect?
If you want a summary...
Portugal overcame an opioid epidemic through an "enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction – and itself... The official policy of decriminalisation made it far easier for a broad range of services (health, psychiatry, employment, housing etc) that had been struggling to pool their resources and expertise, to work together more effectively to serve their communities."
"Massive international cultural shifts in thinking about drugs and addiction are needed to make way for decriminalisation and legalisation globally. In the US, the White House has remained reluctant to address... but... one has to want the change in order to make it."
I'm interested to hear ideas on how other countries can come to be less reluctant and want to change if anyone has any.
That's about it really. There are a whole lot of people across the world whose salaries depend on an unending drug war.
In a republic, people are only paid to enforce restrictive drug policy because the people want them to.
Most people look at the issue in simple terms. "Drugs are bad, so keep them away from people". Legalization is a counterintuitive way to lower incidence of use and addiction, it will take a lot to convince people it is good for society.
Edit: Blaming public support for restrictive drug policy on "media" and "politicians" puts the cart before the horse.
Society often moves down the path of least resistance. Tough drug policy is appealing to people because it sounds logical. Therefore the elements of society that depend on the acceptance of the people - politicians, media, etc - also accept it and tow the line.
Influencers do not exist in a vacuum. They are influenced by the prevailing mood just like everyone else.
By 'this circumstance' do you mean the USA, or why drug decriminalisation isn't tried elsewhere?
If the former, consider this fun fact from Wikipedia [1]
"At the beginning of 2008, more than 1 in 100 adults in the United States were in prison or jail. Total US incarceration peaked in 2008. Total correctional population (prison, jail, probation, parole) peaked in 2007. If all prisoners are counted (including juvenile, territorial, ICE, Indian country, and military), then in 2008 the US had around 24.7% of the world's 9.8 million prisoners."
And this one from the same page:
"The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. In 2000, 22 percent of those in federal and state prisons were convicted on drug charges."
I believe state numbers are a bit fuzzy, but at a federal level in 2016 it was around 75% of inmates were in private facilities.
So, long story short, there's a lot of wealthy people keen on keeping things as they are -- the fact that it's an easy political sell to the average not-terribly-well-informed voter is a bonus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
The politician's salary depends on his understanding of getting elected, and not much else. The politician controls the policeman's salary, which now depends on doing things that will make the politician look good.
Some politician, or group of them, figured out that tough-on-crime looks good as a talking point. Nixon figured out that war-on-drugs looks great as a talking point. But at some point, the financial incentives for a whole built out bureaucracy become self reinforcing, even if the citizens' aggregate beliefs change.
But there's nothing special about a Republic. The mob, a totally different sort of shadow-government, though empowered by prohibition, continued to exist long after, up to today. There was a self reinforcing financial incentive for it to continue.
Related is another quote I like, the Shirkey principle:
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” —Clay Shirky
So in that sense it wasn't Rs vs Ds, it was rather Ds & Rs pushing strong for "law and order" --which was likely precipitated by the high crime rates of the 80s and early 90s as well as shoddy studies[2] about criminality.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Music_Resource_Center
[2]http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/very-brief-his...
to put the cart before the horse is an analogy for doing things in the wrong order.
PS: modernizing it:
It is difficult to get someone to understand something, when their salary, lifestyle or belief-system depends upon them not understanding it.
I've always believed power and wealth interact with human nature at a lower level than ideology (to use a bit of a software metaphor). Relating Sinclair's observation to a particular contemporary political group or hot-button issue misses the forest for the trees.
We attach riders to these agreements which make adoption of US drug law a condition of the deal.
This is in first world countries. In the second and third world countries (the middle east and south america, and to a lesser but not negligible extent Africa) we just enforce our laws by force with or without permission.
Singapore's radical drug policy is also working extremely well. Why hasn't the world copied it?
And to be fair, Singapore's drug policy has been working for a lot longer than Portugal's experiment.
Rodrigo Duterte is proving why that method is terrible in 2017.
Police-only is much different. (Though still immoral IMO)
The Portuguese dabbled with the right but about 40 years ago they decided to try it another way.
What you have is remarkable political stability ever since.
Maybe their economy isn't great but I've never met an unhappy or angry Portuguese person (No True Scotsmen notwithstanding of course!). Give me poverty over autocracy any day.
We'd probably run out of money if we tried.