> Why hasn’t the world copied it?
Because there's too much money* to be made in keeping the status quo.
* I use the terms "money" and "power" to mean the same here.
Because there's too much money* to be made in keeping the status quo.
* I use the terms "money" and "power" to mean the same here.
There is no grand conspiracy to keep drugs illegal. There is a vast, semi well intentioned system built over a century that people adapted to over time to profit off of and now that they are profiting they are not going to give it up easily. Because of the governmental nature of the people who profit they are also very well positioned to lobby for themselves. The sheer number of small actors who benefit from this system has made it unbelievably entrenched.
Do you think cartels have an interest in drugs being illegal, and if so could you explain why? I’d expect cartels to welcome the change as they can do away with fighting the law (where they no doubt pour a lot of their resources into) and start operating as legitimate businesses.
Prohibition reduces competition which raises margins. It's the same reason why large corporations like regulation that destroys small competitors. The cartels don't want to have to compete with Joe Farmer in Iowa growing drug crops and selling them at the same margins as corn producers do.
Legitimate opiate producers compete in the same market with illegitimate ones. The force they use is police, dea, etc., instead of guns directly, but the techniques are the same.
After all, a state is what happens when organized crime expands its time horizons.
The state happened when people get fed up of being trodden on by tyrants, warlords and robber barons and decide to implement concepts like law, order and justice.
That it's not perfect doesn't mean it should be reduced to a trite, intellectually bankrupt, soundbite.
For most intents and purposes, the difference between legal and fully decriminalized is not significant.
The parent’s point is that there are many parties with an interest in drugs being criminalized, which explains why the world has not copied Portugal’s decriminalization model.
“Decriminalized” is the same level as when literal snake oil salesmen were going around fairs in the 1880s selling unknown substances that killed you
“Legal” is when the quality is regulated and analyzed for a specific purpose and consumers know what they are buying and sellers face consequences for violating that
Parent talked about profit, but in Portugal the production, distribution and sale are still a crime, and therefore the people profiting from those activities are still the same.
So why not in Germany, the UK, France, Sweden, Italy? Why just Portugal? That is the question.
Less US-centric thinking!
Which is to say, there is a bias everywhere in favor of the status quo.
Many people working together to keep something illegal in order to profit is not a "conspiracy", it's lobbying.
>semi well intentioned system
How is valuing money and power over millions of lives "semi well intenioned"?
It's not like some secret cabal where they sit around in black robes and vote on how to maximize false arrests for profit.
Do you think out of every one of the millions of people in that system that literally every person has absolutely no intention other than profit? Yes, some people within the legal and even prison system have good intentions. To think otherwise a pretty cartoonish world view.
But we know from nature that this needn't be the case. Look at a school of fish. There is no hierarchical command structure, nor any democratic council of the fishes, or anything like that. Their schooling behavior is emergent behavior from each individual fish following more or less the same rules as the other, coded in their DNA. They take cues from each other, go with the flow, but they're not actually conspiring with the other fish. There is no Fish Illuminati, just a bunch of fish doing normal fish things.
The failure to recognize the possibility of emergent (or convergent) behavior in humans is I think the root cause of many conspiracy theories. This is related to the concept of pareidolia, e.g. seeing patterns when there are none. In this case there are genuine patterns (fish clump up in schools) but the explanation offered up for this behavior is erroneous (fish Illuminati.)
(Apart from the US where opiate manufacturers are big lobbyists and some weed could both strip you of your right to vote and put you in a for-profit prison. The US is an outlier here)
The repercussions are far more egregious than that:
The right to vote can be stripped for life[0]. After you've "paid your dues" to society, you will find it hard, if not impossible, to find employment again (also known as having a felony on your record [e.g.: felony possession]); which some states are now recognising is a form of cruel and unusual punishment[1].
To be fair, American society is trending better towards being less militant about justice but it still has quite a long way to go.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_rights_due_to_convicti...
[1] - https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Pennsylvania-automatical...