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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

This has been suggested by the liberals (Venstre), socialists and the greens for some time now, what made this happen to a large extent was that a number of younger conservatives have spent lots of time lobbying for a new stance in their party (Høyre).

With any luck, the next goal will be legalisation and most drugs being sold by either pharmacies or the state-run stores (Vinmonopolet) which already have a monopoly on selling alcohol at over 4.75% by volume.

Replacing the dirty drugs addicts currently consume with pharmaceutical-quality stuff will work wonders for our drug-related deaths statistics - not to mention the improvement in quality of life for those affected and the hit the current criminal suppliers will take.

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It would be an interesting experiment to extend Vinmonopolet since the infrastructure and culture (restricted opening hours, no advertisements, etc - at least that's how it works in Sweden) around it already exists. This would be different to other countries where you probably would have to trust for-profit actors to handle it well, or implement a monopoly from scratch.

That probably depends on how much space it needs at the end and whether or not you allow things like coffee shops (after all, we are talking full legalisation).

If they just need a counter, I'm guessing Vinmonopolet will do just fine even though their stores tend to be small with well-used space. If they allow for coffee shops/bars, it might be split much like alcohol: Weaker or set strength pre-rolled joints available at grocery stores much like cigarettes and beer and unrolled pot/hash at the liquor stores.

It's worth noting that Høyre is not just conservative but "value conservative", verdikonservativ in Norwegian. The basic is to not mess with things that works, but replace what doesn't.

Being politicians they do not follow this at all times, but they are quite far from your typical right wing party elsewhere.

In this case, I hope they follow Venstres lead in this matter and just legalises it. Venstre (Left) is not really a left wing party either, they just entered the government with Høyre and Fremskrittspartiet (Progress party), the party most to the right of the ones in parliament.

This proposition is also supported by SV (Sosialist Left Party), one of the most left wing parties in the parliament but not by the workers party (AP) nor the christians or the farmers.

I've been quite (pleasantly) surprised that the socialists have supported this as when I was still living in Norway, the younger socialists were all rabidly anti-drugs.

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