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Comment by coryrc | Hacker News Reader

As Portugal shows, decriminalizing drugs reduces their use. The position you are mocking is actually consistent.

Portugal has a much more comprehensive set of programs to get people off hard drugs than any of the US jurisdictions that have decriminalized (or stopped enforcing through executive action) hard drugs.

I'm not sure we can take the results of a single experiment in an incredibly homogenous tiny country in Europe to mean an outcome is replicable across the world.

Indeed. The "experiment" in Portugal is not proving it works everywhere, but shows it can work, which indicates we should study it further and possibly deploy it in more countries across the world, to see if it works elsewhere and if we could possibly make it even more effective.

While Portugal is probably the most famous example of decriminalizing working in humans favor, it's not the only example, it has been employed in other states too. Netherlands has de-facto decriminalized all drugs (in practice, not in law), Czech Republic has decriminalized all (most?) drugs as well.

We can, however, easily take the opposite conclusion: drug criminalization has been an unmitigated disaster in almost every country it’s been tried short of a few incredibly homogenous countries like Japan and countries for which no real data is available like North Korea.

It's a disaster in Japan and North Korea too, albeit in different ways. In North Korea the state manufactures some very nasty narcotics and distributes them as a way to gain foreign currency with the "nice" side effect of destabilising those places they export to. Japan has a plainly crazy attitute to cannabis, with people losing their careers and being socially ostracised over the most passing association with the drug.

I don't know these called disaster.

Fair point. But, if something isn't criminal, then it should be fine to read about people doing that thing –– which is all that this article is. Railing against it like it's somehow an affront to post it seems neither productive nor fair.

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