Comment by ssalka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssalka | Hacker News Reader

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> it remains to be seen how it will play out in practice

Drug policy reform is extremely difficult to carry out well, mostly due to the social impact it has on both the populace and governing bodies - adjustment doesn't happen immediately and are likely to be bumps in the road. From the sound of the article, it sounds like Norway is headed in the right direction, though it may take everyone a bit to get on the right path. Still, this is already happening elsewhere in the world[1], and I think it will continue to happen more as time goes on.

I don't know many details of Norway's drug policies (nor Portugal's, for that matter), but it makes sense that decriminalization + treatment, when implemented well, will generally far exceed incarceration when it comes to overall effectiveness and impact on reducing drug abuse, crime, and deaths.

I hear people are pretty happy in Norway (compared to the states, at least), but police harassment is never any fun - I hope things improve there.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/05/portugals-radic...

Please, nobody would ever know how difficult it is. The problem is that a century of draconian enforcement has created a MASSIVE private complex that feeds and pays so many people that the interests have rooted in the system.

Don't be fooled, the lack of progress is almost exclusively a product of vested interest in enforcement and this vague intellectual question of "how?"

In Norway it's even worse.

We generally have very few special interests groups, however the narcotics police have formed their own political group that constantly writes for news papers, joins debates and speaks to the politicians, and their agenda is similar to the reefer madness stuff from the US every time someone remotely threatens their jobs (via deregulation / legalisation).

This _is_ a step in the right direction though.

In Finland we have seemingly corrupted narcotic police and their chief is now going to jail for taking bribes, smuggling drugs and hiding huge amounts of money in his backyard. And then we have the non-profits with crazy fanatical leaders writing texts to newspapers about how a single joint destroyed kids life. We have crazy fanatical ideologies about drugs, alcohol and tobacco.

On the other side we have growing wealth gaps and people drinking and combining it with whatever pill is the cheapest on the corner. The government has a monopoly for selling alcohol, which is created to protect the people from the harms of alcohol and on the other hand needs to gain profit and sell more of the product.

Drugs might become a problem for a person, but how the society reacts to them currently is not really helping anybody.

Finland has one of the lowest wealth gaps in EU (or world) and it's hardly a good reason for someone to do drugs.

Yes, there is a lot of moralizing about drugs and alcohol, but it is slowly getting better.

Yes, the head of Helsinki drug police (not a national position) being on trial for such a series of crimes looks ridiculous, but on the other hand, it shows that the system does something when things go bad.

What do you think about the new law that allows police to walk with dogs in any public happening and check the bags of suspicions people for drugs?

Edit: and looking at the queues waiting to get free food is definitely showing that the amount of poor people in the country is going up.

I don't think much of it: the practice was quite normal until recently when an ombudsman made an interpretation which the parliament apparently had not intended. So the parliament made a specific law about it and the old way is resumed. Overall, I think it is quite okay to try to keep drug dealing out of concerts and such.

Food queues turn up if there is free delivery of food. There was certainly much more poverty (I mean poverty of the "difficulty to make end's meet" kind) in times before the current food queues. But there is no longer a social stigma in picking up food from queues, and similarly the last-resort income support is nowadays increasingly treated as a universal basic income, even if the law wasn't intending it so.

The actual problem is that it is increasingly hard to lift oneself up from (relative) poverty through work because the job market eliminates entry-level jobs.

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