Portugal drug law shows results ten years on, experts say

This policy should make sense to anyone who has ever had any involvement with someone with an addiction. Generally the addiction is a symptom of other problems, often mental illness, that if treated appropriately would help prevent a slide back into addiction.

I would be interested to see a comparison of the total cost of this policy contrasted against, for example, the US style. Certainly I would expect the initial outlay to be greater in the Portuguese style system but as it gets people out of the system for good the lifetime cost should be lower. While I don't like to have everything measured with a monetary cost, social and moral duties are important, it would make it an easier sell to law makers and their constituents.

I read this recently:

> That fewer young people are trying drugs in Portugal may be the case (“Radical drug law could be imported to Britain”, April 22). But this simply reflects a Europe-wide trend, nowhere more evident than in the United Kingdom. The alarming Europe-wide increase in young people’s illicit drug use between 1995 and 2003 has come to a halt and is decreasing — in Portugal by rather less than the European average.

http://dpnoc.ca/2011/05/01/portugal-drug-direction-praised-f...

Now I'm fairly skeptical of any article of this sort written by someone from an organization who has "oppose legalization of drugs" as one of their principles, but I've checked some of their facts against the UNODC World Drug Report and they seem sound. Now either I'm missing something, or the UNODC report is wrong, or there's something else not being taken into account. Can anyone shed some light?

Not really surprising. Rehabilitation and re-socialization are common for treatment of other criminals in Europe too. It makes much more sense than "getting revenge" by locking people up to "punish them", especially if the crime they committed is largely victim-less (in case of drug abuse its the offender who is actually the victim at the same time).

I live in Portugal and know many doctors. The fact that drug addicts are now able to use public health services without fear of arrest is huge.

The problem with exuberant cries--otherwise gratifyingly progressive--to import this tactic into the US is the implication that such policies can be transplanted hermetically, in an acontextual (and perhaps ahistorical) way.

The feasibility of successfully recasting habitual hard drug use as a medical problem would, in reality, depend on a huge constellation of other independent features of socioeconomic policy and culture. I think these features are not present here as they are there, or in the necessary proportion.

For one, without a government healthcare sector and universal coverage, a question will immediately arise in the US that does not arise quite so readily or with such urgency in Portugal: "Who is going to pay for these addicts' treatment?"

I think that's just one example. There are many other things about the somewhat more raw and brutal existence in America as a mentally ill--or otherwise chronically ill--person that might yield unsuccessful, or at least orthogonal results.