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?"
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.