Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.
Neoliberalism in a nutshell.
They want to follow the "good" example of the US, like most other EU member states are now doing.
Hence why having private insurance as part of the job benefits is widely appreciated, unless one is a public employee with nice health packages like ADSE.
I am approaching 50 now, and seldom ever had a family doctor for example.
However in Germany it is much worse, where public healthcare is almost managed as the private one, and where many doctor offices differ their treatments depending on which kind of insurance one has, public vs private. You get different waiting rooms, different treatment proposals, different appointment flexibility,...
Doctors triage based on medical needs not your social status or financial wealth in the Netherlands. It's one of those things that ethically sets this country above others and I hope it never changes.
For example, the UK's public healthcare funding has increased from below 3% of GDP to over 7% from the 1950s until 2018/2019 (so just before covid).[0] And yet the perception is that the NHS is always underfunded.
The UK's budget in 2018-19 was £842 billion and almost £160 billion went to essentially the NHS. I think that we will eventually have to settle into a reality of always underfunded public healthcare and it's going to get worse, because these problems plague essentially all European countries (and many others in the world).
[0] https://www.health.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/full_wi...
If you want the freedom from society to use drugs, then you shouldn't rely on society for that.
...how about basic human empathy?
How about empathy from your side? I have lost a friend due to addiction despite "care".
The best solution is not being exposed to some classes of drugs at all and fixing other issues that cause this.
Maybe that's true, but the genie isn't going back into the bottle as like 50 years of the 'war on drugs' has so clearly demonstrated.
The war on drugs started 18 June 1971 with Richard Nixon's declaration that drug abuse is “public enemy number one.” At this point, drugs seem more available than ever. I strongly suspect we would minimize harm in the reality in which we live (rather than the pretend reality where drugs don't exist) by acknowledging that.
Joking aside, look at Singapore for a success case.
I'm not sure how Singapore fares, but Japan is also known for its hard-line drug policy. This just pushes the harm underground. Just because you don't see it, and society turns a blind eye to it, doesn't mean it's not there. tl;dr: the hardline policy towards drug use in Japan created a massive underground meth problem. [1]
[edit] It doesn't take much research to find out something quite similar is happening in Singapore, too.
> “People think drugs are very hard to get in Singapore, but actually before the pandemic they were everywhere, and even now there are people selling them.” [2]
Hardline policies don't reduce the harm. They just stop people from asking for help.
[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/xg8q7k/how-stigma-created-ja...
[2] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/young-an...
The overall impact of alcohol on society is not because it is “much more dangerous than most”, but because it is consumed (and abused) by orders of magnitude more people than almost every other drug.
I think it's fair to say that alcohol does far more harm to the user than psychedelics.
I agree but also think that’s a very different statement from “alcohol is a much more dangerous drug than most”
So have I. The drug was alcohol. Adults make choices and live with the consequences. shrug
Think of it abstractly like refusing vaccination. You messing up your life has outbound consequences for others (even if no money is spent on you).
Yes we should have a “War on Drugs”? What could possibly go wrong?
Common Pool Resources are a prime example of a paradigm that escapes this dichotomy.
Privatize is an acceptable verbiage for a government or government-owned entity which has outsourced to a private corporation.
Not all non-profits are corporations–many non-profits are trusts, and legally speaking trusts are not corporations (although it is not uncommon for them to own corporations, or to have corporations as their trustees–or even beneficiaries). Many small non-profits are unincorporated associations. Nonprofit versus for-profit status is an orthogonal dimension from corporate vs non-corporate legal structure.
Also, "non-profit" isn't a "colloquialism", it is an official legal term in several jurisdictions: for example, 37 US states have (at least partly) adopted the American Bar Association's "Model Nonprofit Corporation Act" [0]. And it isn't just an official legal term in the US, see section 48 of the Australian state of Victoria's Payroll Tax Act 2007, entitled "Non-profit organisations" [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Nonprofit_Corporation_Ac...
[1] https://austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/vic/consol_a...
I think you mean to say, "a non-profit entity cannot be owned by a for-profit entity in such a way that would give it controlling interest"
A corporation can be non-profit (aka not-for-profit), and there is no problem with non-profit corporation A owning non-profit corporation B. Non-profit vs for-profit is orthogonal to corporate vs other (e.g. trust) legal structure.
Given how the term is conventionally used, 'privatize' implies that for-profit enterprise has taken over, and even pedantically - looking at what the root word of the term technically means instead of how the term is conventionally used - it implies for-profit enteprise, given private ownership, in the strictest sense of the term, means no restrictions on how the private actor who owns the property may use that property, including no restrictions on distributing profits to shareholders.
Granted this would be an uncommon use of the verbiage given the situation, that does not mean it is incorrect usage. You are correct that typically privatization occurs when a government service is executed by or government infrastructure is transferred to a private for-profit corporation, it is not necessarily the case that it has to be a for-profit corporation for privatization to occur.
Non-profits can still be and are privately owned, what’s different about them is the accounting rules they are subject to and their status per statute. In exchange for their tax advantaged status, they give up their ability to return a profit to the owners, but it still has owners.
Also just a side note, I would be interested to hear if anyone wants to chime in if any of this is fundamentally different under Portuguese law.
Whether non-profit private entities have the same properties that - in the case of for-profit enterprise - motivate critics of privatization to oppose government reliance on them, is orthogonal to that point. But on the subject, that might be true, but my take is that the important part to most critics of privatization is the entities are motivated by profit.
So this still qualifies as privatization, no?
If your contention is more rooted in the amount of direction that the government gives the private entity it is "delegating" to, then maybe that's something to explore?
That said, I would still say that using contractors like Blackwater or Lockheed Martin is "privatizing" various aspects of the military industrial complex, even if their actions are to greater or lesser degrees guided by government mandate.
In this sense, the fact that this was delegated to non-profit organizations, which have the same objectives as the state (provide help, rather than profit) makes some difference.
So the issue here seem more the funding cuts rather than who manages them.
The counter-argument is that the 5 orgs can be somewhat more efficient than the one monolith, but the key is the conditional: they can, but there is no guarantee, whereas the 4 extra overheads are guaranteed. That's one of the many systemic flaws of privatized/delegated systems.
Because, as organizations scale up and enough time passes, the usual outcome is a gigantic web of inscrutable policies and procedures. And lots of people to write and enforce them. Getting something done that in a small organization can trivially be handled by the person originally seeing the need for it, will in a large organization often involve five other people in a messy chain of emails. Or it can't be done at all, unless one is willing and able to play politics to get it done.
Example: I work at a school/university with some 30 thousand students, that is the merger product of many smaller schools, each targeting different professions. These mergers were done for efficiency reasons. I'd estimate the teacher/support head count overhead for these originals schools to be somewhere between 30 and 50%. Currently, we're well over 100% overhead. So we employ more non-teachers than we employ teachers. (And on top of that, teachers handle a lot of non-teaching-related work, of course.) Somehow, the merger is seen as a success.
Small organizations are awesome. It's a shame that government rules and regulations often make them unsustainable.
/rant
Years ago, the law was changed to allow mentally-ill but benign or even non-ill people to escape the "snake pits", mental institutions that kept people incarcerated and drugged. This allowed lots of people to recover.
But then Ronald Reagan (as governor of california) cut state mental illness funding.
Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others".
Many homeless people are these mentally ill people, and they can't get help (and they can't be forced in unless they are dangerous, which is usually how recovery begins)
This nice timelime adds to what this person said.
There's more that helped shape the publics perception of mental health. The movie "One flew over the cukcoos nest" seemed to create a negative perception about these facilities.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1983.53.1.1...
This study in 1983, though small, showed that 4 out of 5 people who were questioned before the film was released ,then after, changed their view of mental institutions to negative. They also showed them a TV documentary that was more factual about the mental health system but it didn't have an impact.
In my opinion this is case of the public hearing about a systemtic issue within a very nessacary institution, regardless of how frequent or serious, becoming upset, locking their view in, then the government taking action by either reducing or eliminating that institution.
It's the same with mental institutions. There are people who should be committed for the rest of their lives and nothing, short of curing them, changes that
https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/couple-attacked-man-killed-...
https://www.king5.com/article/news/crime/suspect-charged-sou...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10492101/Moment-hom...
I guess, fine for them, bad for us.
They'll end up confined anyway, just a lot of collateral damage on the way.
He has a short novel about man who tries to get arrested and convicted to be in jail for winter. He attempted to rob a person, broke the window glass and finally got his arrest for loitering, if I remember correctly.
That’s the stick. The carrot is a generous welfare system which isn’t afraid of invasive intervention. Those deemed a danger to others or themselves can be detained for treatment. Involuntary commitment has virtually disappeared in many US states. Mental health treatment is also free, so there isn’t a barrier to access (though lately it has become harder to access treatment which isn’t considered acute).
* Outside of LVT.
This is definitely an issue with levying LVT at fairly low rates. Granted, at the time it was relatively high but it wasn't high enough. The 'ideal' LVT would bring down the price of land -considerably-, close to $0. The fact that land still has a large selling price means it is still largely financed with loans, and sensitive to interest rate adjustments.
I suppose that is an impressive feat to do something that no other governors can fix.
Or perhaps they don’t want to fix it since they can just blame Reagan and then pretend it’s unsolvable.
> Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others".
It's been 50 years between then and now, so... why has no other politician increased it if the funding cut was the problem?
However, California has run massive surpluses lately: The average ending balance from 2006 through the 2019-20 fiscal year was a surplus of about $2.8 billion; for 2020 through 2022-23 it was more than $37.5 billion.
So why doesn't Newsom, or his predecessors, re-establish the funding? Clearly it isn't a priority to them either.
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/06/13/californias-b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100th_meridian_west
> In the United States, this meridian roughly marks the boundary between the semi-arid climate in the west and the humid continental and humid subtropical climates in the east and is used as shorthand to refer to that arid-humid boundary.
In reality, in the 1970s there was a series of landmark supreme court decisions that dealt with the civil rights of mentally ill, setting a very high bar for involuntary commitment. In California specifically, Short-Doyle act of '57 functionally defunded state run asylums, and Lanterman-Prentis-Short Act of '67 capped the length of involuntary commitment half a decade before the SCOTUS decisions.
http://n204xn214l.pbworks.com/f/Short-Doyle+Act.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterman%E2%80%93Petris%E2%80...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Connor_v._Donaldson
What is fascinating to me is that you can plainly see this evolution of thought play out in books, music and film. The portrayal of involuntary commitment slowly shifts from something that is normalized and somewhat necessary for society at the beginning of the 20th century, to something that is unabashedly evil by the end of it.
Everyone knows sending an innocent person to prison is really bad. But if you throw "they're not well..." in front of it and you have all the green lights you need.
Mostly agree with your argument and I'm a Reagan fanboy, but Reagan did put his signature on that law. It was a bi-partisan bill (Lanterman was a Republican, Petris and Short were Democrats), and it passed with veto-proof near unanimous majorities, but he put his name on it.
So long as people think that these are the problems in society (and not, say, billionaires) the government can keep creating ineffective policies to "fix" these problems (even though they haven't for god knows how many hundreds of years) and people lap it up.
> nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.
You mean like a west-coast American city?
> “When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,” said Keith Humphreys, former senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”
> Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab.
And in Oregon...
> extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation. Meanwhile, overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.
Why fund services that go unused?...Tent cities don't exist solely in places without access to housing, and giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is a death sentence.
Sounds like they've already dying.
Would you suggest we stop all drug treatment and let the fire burn itself out so to speak?
Drug use is correlated to the economy and the happiness of the population. Portugal needs to fix unemployment and get some economic growth going.
sounds very plausible, where is the fallacy?
I would expect people in SF SROs to OD more for multiple reasons, but I haven’t seen any research on the specifics.
> We enrolled 423 participants (199 intervention; 224 control). Eighty-six percent of those randomized to PSH received housing compared with 36 percent in usual care.
> Seventy (37 treatment; 33 control) participants died.
That’s a very high risk population.
> We found a similar high mortality rate in both treatment and control groups. Individuals experiencing homelessness have a greater age-adjusted mortality rate than housed counterparts.25 Among those who died, 89 percent of those in the intervention group had been housed compared with 28 percent in the control group.
I really want to pattern match, but it’s just not enough data. Worse they may have undercounted deaths in the control group. “Abode provided data on death for all participants who died while living in Abode housing. We queried County death certificate data on all participants who did not appear in any source of study data for 6 or more months.”
> giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is the key that unlocks recovery
I've constructed my argument identically and provided the same amount of evidence for my position.
When you compare both positions side by side, I think you can easily see that neither is valuable. They are both opinions being presented as facts (begging the question / assumption of truth / unwarranted assumption).
except that when we talk about privacy for addicts, we are actually talking about extreme loneliness.
which is the fastest route towards OD.
evidence show that
adults with mental health issues are more than twice as likely to experience loneliness as those with strong mental health [1]
Loneliness can increase the risk of early mortality by 26% [2]
editor's note: loneliness alone, imagine loneliness + mental health issues + severe drug addiction.
addicts don't need privacy, on the contrary, they need sociality. 4 walls shared with other people could provide that, 4 walls alone won't and will probably make things worse.
[1] https://newsroom.thecignagroup.com/loneliness-epidemic-persi...
[2] Holt-Lunstad et al., ‘Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review’, Perspectives on psychological science 10.2 (2015), pp. 227-237.
What everyone's missing is the Quality of the housing.
If the place is so roach infested and you fight bed bugs others bring in and you constantly lose everything you own to the conditions of the building, then in what mind would that have better outcomes than on the street?
The depression that they term loneliness isn't just loneliness, it's a complete sense of defeat and pointlessness resultant directly from environment.
Really....
Theoretically yes.
In practice, no.
I've dealt with heroin addiction in my family, believe me when I say that privacy is not the solution, the solution is giving people a purpose outside of their constant quest to find ways to shoot up.
As I said, 4 walls can be beneficial, unless it's 4 walls to hide and keep everybody else out, except their dealers.
I'm all for reducing the damage, it works, but it doesn't mean simply giving them a hone, it means giving them a home to go back to, after they did something useful outside of that home.
The 4 walls should represent going back to a normal life.
> If the place is so roach infested and you fight bed bugs others bring in and you constantly lose everything you own to the conditions of the building, then in what mind would that have better outcomes than on the street?
if addicts cared about that, there would be no problem.
So long as the majority just want them out of sight or dead, we need to focus on ensuring that they are seen as members of the community rather than a blight, right?
I don't know how it works in the US, but they are primarily people in need of care, like a person with a disease, they need to be cured before they can go back to the society and be part of it or they will return to segregate themselves and die alone sooner or later.
Putting them behind 4 walls is exactly making them invisible, so that the general population won't be upset.
Not exactly a solution in my eyes.
So long as they are viewed as degenerates unwilling to engage in basic care, there will never be the public will. And for some they wouldn't take the help even if it was available, because for a minority it is in fact a lifestyle choice.
Given both those facts, the first step to getting public will for treatment is to minimize the negative perceptions of the class, which is best achieved in the immediate term by reducing visibility, specifically of the street drug addicts.
Combine with safe supply and direct interventionist supports (room checks, emergency buttons, etc) and there would be both an immediate improvement in QoL, individual outcomes and public sentiment towards further supports.
A key is to not permit use in rooms but only at safe sites within the building. Rule violation would mean switching to a monitored room (camera to ensure no drug abuse).
One issue underlying all of this though so that such systems simply can't work for those who suffered abuse by the system in the past, there's too many of our visible homeless and drug users who are where they are almost exclusively because of abuses in foster care or imprisonment (borne of false conviction). Those people will almost never participate in a gov or NGO program which includes facilities and monitoring.... And I don't really blame them.
The truth is we need to stop the problem before it starts and the only real way is to prevent traumas, treats those we can't prevent and bring justice against those who use the system to abuse others or protect abusers.
Sadly, in many ways most drug addicts are a "lost cause" before they even start using, just as so many alcoholics are.
That's the consequences of systemic willful ignorance of trauma.
Again, that's a different problem entirely.
In my Country healthcare is public and funded by taxation.
We also have publicly funded damage reduction centers where they provide methadone to heroin addicts, problem is most of the time they do not show up voluntarily because of the stigma associated with it, secondly because those willingly participating are already in recover and take it to minimize the effects of abstinence. They are already on the path of healing.
> So long as they are viewed as degenerates unwilling to engage in basic care
They aren't all degenerates, you are putting emphasis on something no one ever said, but they are obviously unwilling or they would not need special treatments.
If they are able to take care of themselves, they don't need external help.
But only a very small minority is.
> A key is to not permit use in rooms but only at safe sites within the building
Which, again, as I've said before, is exactly why they do not need "4 walls with privacy"
Methadone is permitted only in person and they have to assume it in the facility that provides it under medical check, otherwise the first thing most of them would do is trade the methadone with something else.
> Rule violation would mean switching to a monitored room
That's the one thing that makes everything worse: basically it's an house arrest. We do not arrest as many addicts as in the US, but we still have jails full of people that used drugs that would be much better of somewhere else outside a cell (which basically is the 4 walls with privacy minus the drugs plus the suicide opportunity)
> The truth is we need to stop the problem before it starts and the only real way is to prevent traumas
We need to do both.
Holy hell active misrepresentation much? Or is your reading comprehension just that poor?
You even quoted it yet didnt actually read it?
> So long as they are viewed as degenerates unwilling to engage in basic care
VIEWED AS
That's not remotely the same as actually being such.
Your whole diatribe is the same disingenuous, misrepresentative, seemingly deceptive, bs.
I'm not engaging with someone so dishonest, regardless of their intentionality.
Be better.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> VIEWED AS
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.
I am a non native English speaker, but you are honestly trying to have a fight on something that it's not there.
Never said you called them degenerates, but that not all of them are (implying that some of them are), and that the emphasis on the "viewed as degenerates" is superfluous because no one pointed that out in this conversation.
Moreover, they are not viewed as unwilling, they are unwilling or we would not be talking about it.
I'll explain once again: they are not simply "viewed as degenerates unwilling to" they are obviously unwilling, some of them are clearly degenerates and all of them engage in some kind of anti social behaviour, mostly against their family members, which makes them outcasts.
Or the issue we are discussing would not exist!
> Be better.
Never been better, thanks.
Yea effing exactly. That's what You did not do
> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
Italics would have been useless with YOU since you have such poor language comprehension, as evidenced by your attempt to use a rule against me that you initially and then repeatedly violated.
Now for the rest of your bs:
You're a hateful bigot hiding behind low effort shit talk.
I'm not being mean or hyperbolic, that s exactly what you are.
I see no value in continuing to engage with someone who plays games with the truth and refuses to engage in good faith.
May you live in the world as you would have it, so long as you live as the least advantaged.
is uppercase working better?
> since you have such poor language comprehension
so' sicuro che tu invece capisci il romano da paura...
> You're a hateful bigot hiding behind low effort shit talk.
Are you sure you are okay?
Have you tried to talk to a specialist about your rage?
I can help, if you come to Italy, I know many good doctors, my family mostly works in public healthcare here, many of them in psychiatric care, others in infectious diseases, my mom took care of AIDS patients for over 20 years, I grew up playing soccer with addicts in recover, I saw many of them die because they were put behind 4 walls and left alone, please take care of yourself and go to see your friends and family as much as you can.
> May you live in the world as you would have it, so long as you live as the least advantaged.
Fai del male e pensa, fai del bene e scorda.
Male non fare, paura non avere.
Pure troll behavior, as detected prior.
Shame on you.
directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.
Like, for example (emphasis is mine, to highlight the relevant bits)
- Italics would have been useless with YOU since you have such poor language comprehension
- Now for the rest of your bs
- You're a hateful bigot hiding behind low effort shit talk
- I'm not being mean or hyperbolic, that s exactly what you are. (I let you, the reader, guess what other biases are present in this sentence)
- May you live in the world as you would have it, so long as you live as the least advantaged. (this is technically a curse, I'll let you decide if you prefer to call it Schadenfreude or malevolence)
Sincerely hoping that you'll be better soon, I send you all my best wishes.
p.s. this is the psychiatric hospital were my aunt worked until it's been shut down.
I used to go visit there when I was a kid, to play with the patients' children, who had not many friends as one can imagine.
I know a thing or two about mental health issues.
If that makes me a hateful bigot, I am proud to be one then.
I'm sure you'll have no problem reading and understanding Italian.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ospedale_psichiatrico_Santa_Ma...
A curse? It's technically a blessing on any Decent person ... It's only a curse on those who want inequality and others to suffer....
Which is exactly what you are from everything youve shown, so you deserve exactly that.
You seem to have unintentionally proved my point about your nature and form of engagement.
Bravo, you done played yourself.
Not in my book.
The least advantaged are the people dying in the Mediterranean sea right now or fighting a war or having too little to eat for them and their children.
Maybe it is for those who believe in that book where a person named God kills the people he doesn't like.
But I guess one could read it as "if everyone is the least advantaged, there are no least advantaged" that for me, a socialist, coming from a family with deep roots in the Italian Communist party, is welcome, as long as we work together to improve anyone's condition, not just for some.
I guess that wouldn't fly in places like the United States.
> Which is exactly what you are from everything youve shown, so you deserve exactly that.
So by your logic I deserve it for wanting inequality and others to suffer
Which, BTW, it is only in your mind.
Are you one of those people that still believe in "an eye for an eye"?
Are you stuck to 3 thousands years ago or what?
Haven't you read your book?
It says "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" not "thou shalt despise thy neighbor as thyself".
Have you ever spent quality time with an addict, a former one, a person suffering from mental health issues, a person with an infectious disease or terminally hill, a kid from Rwanda with the skull crushed by a bat or part of the scalp removed by a machete that miraculously survived?
What's your contribution to alleviate human suffering in this World?
I'm eager to ear about it.
> You seem to have unintentionally proved my point about your nature and form of engagement.
Nahhh, I simply proved that you can't stop hating on me for some reason and that your condition is called obsession and it's driven by rage.
And you know how I know it?
Because you said there was no point arguing with me 2 days ago, and yet you're still here.
Are you in love, by any chance?
Unfortunately for you I'm taken.
Either you're actively choosing to present as willfully ignorant Or you are a genuine effing moron who can't comprehend simple single sentence statements.
In either case, you should refrain from engaging with any other humans on any issue of substance, ever again.
Given the rest of your pointless diatribe, I'm going with the former and that you're a worthless excuse for a human more aptly labelled a massive trolling pos.
I don't believe in fairy tales.
I am an adult person, sorry, you can try that with your kids if you want.
That option does not exist for many people who are living in hell right now.
> Either you're actively choosing to present as willfully ignorant
Still waiting to ear what you did to help other people in your life to cast a judgement on other people.
Apart from your bla bla bla bla, your self entitled attitude and your self-congratulation syndrome, you seem to be simply an enraged kid full of bullshit.
> Given the rest of your pointless diatribe, I'm going with the former and that you're a worthless excuse for a human more aptly labelled a massive trolling pos.
bla bla bla bla
If you are older than 18, you got a big problem man.
Either that or you are one of those catholic zealots that have ruined this World.
I feel pity for you, honestly.
If you were my son, I would do anything in my power to help you.
Unfortunately your parents are not like me, apparently.
No amount of words changes that
said the person that never helped anybody, except his ego...
still here? are you so alone in this World?
Listen kid, I really would like to be here for you as long as you need it, but I got my own family to spend time with, so take care, please find someone to talk IRL and stop being so angry all the time.
It only hurts you.
^ that's you
Most use until they die of "old age" or long term damage from use.
Key terms being Old Age and Long Term.
"Access to housing" isn't enough. You might have "access" to health care but unable to afford it. You need housing as a right - even without payment - alongside enough adequate housing for everyone. And allow folks to do things in their own home. If they cannot do it at their home with other people, the person in question does not have adequate housing.
And that last bit - about a death sentence? That is only for a few addicts. A subset of addicts die.
If you have to get clean to get housing, housing is inadequate. I'd probably not go for rehab if I were homeless: I'd just have to be sober for the misery.
And that's what we give people. That's what we are offering. Various forms of misery.
But I have known addicts, they don’t exactly take care of their things. It’s very easy to imagine that much of the state supplied housing would quickly become unsafe and or destroyed.
How do you handle that?
It’s not uncommon for it to be unsafe and destroyed.
But I also wanted to ask the OP (who mentioned housing as a right) how that could be avoided.
And have different sorts of housing. Some folks - not just addicts - could really benefit from a place modeled after a motel or hotel: Cleaning services and so on, private room and private bath. Some folks could do with a kitchen or provided food. Some folks could use these things yet would be better with a seperate bedroom and living room... well, you get the picture.
At no time is everyone - addict or not - going to be able to take care of things. We should help those folks.
the 70's abolition of mental asylums by Regan. We closed the thing with no alternative and expected anything but a disaster?
Most places can do this. The US can do it. Everything contrary is just excuses.
Most of places on Earth has snow, heat waves, no coasts, biting insects, or a combination of that. They are also not located in the richest country, in a place which historically produces jobs.
So, under this regime specifically San Francisco will get population influx until it is not usable for absolute majority of people (think a bro dormitory the size of SF), and that process will be repeated for many other lucrative locations on Earth (heck, many cities are arguably already going that route).
I don't see how free housing differs from sacrificing every place you like to tragedy of the commons on grand scale, until there is nothing for you to like there anymore and you move on yourself.
Other than that, there are places on Earth with basically free housing. Check out Vorkuta.
Honestly, if a person isn’t up for it, we need to stop trying to convince them to stay around and be miserable. Elective suicide should be a basic right, and drugs are one way out. We only create misery by “helping” people that don’t want hep.
Criminalize public drug use.
Provide basic unregulated housing, not unlike squattable buildings. Set up AI monitored surveillance and prohibit attempts to form any kind of exploitative enterprise. Self registration with biometric access. Provide fentanyl dispensers. Come through once a day and dispose of the dead.
Create an exit ramp where those that wish to can easily climb out through rehab into a viable path forward. Just by walking out they can register for rehab and get on a bus to a facility with an on-ramp to society.
Let them live in the stark misery that they choose so they can confront it head on and decide if that’s what they want. But keep them outside of the general population during their self destruction process.
Provide stepping-stone housing, mental health services, and educational on-ramps for people that need housing and can test clean of the typical death-spiral drugs.
It should be made clear that certain kinds of drug use are part of a suicide process. Make it unattractive to flirt with, and limit it to private spaces.
Social drugs such as alcohol and thc are not so incompatible with society and don’t really need regulatory interference aside from limiting access to minors.
Still a better love story than twilight.
Alcohol is very unsociable - calling it social seems odd to me. Anecdotally alcohol seems pretty destructive to me. I am middle-aged so perhaps I have seen more of the deeper long-term destructive effects than you? New Zealanders generally have quite a problem with alcohol abuse.
And it was alcohol that was worse.
Most people don't care to use it (heroin) at all let alone regularly. Opiates cause nausea and retching in most areas drug abuse levels....
Alcohol was far more popular and consistently harmful...
Just ask the wives of the time what they'd rather thier husbands use....
Point being, like anything, it's complex. Yes, alcohol is a factor in abuse. But it's not the cause.
The context was the impacts of X substance vs Y substance, right?
In all cases the actual cause is the underlying problems but it's the substance that (is perceived as) causes the manifestation that otherwise wouldn't occur, right?
So what purpose did your comment actually serve into he thread other than to derail an extant line of discourse?
What I saw, you ended on a very vague set of statements that I assume were supposed to support that you were saying.
"Alcohol was far more popular and consistently harmful..."
Implication of alcohol being more harmful without evidence to support the claim.
History tells us lots of stories. For example, just because the temperance movement existed doesn't mean anything other than a bunch of people got it in their head that alcohol was the devil's drink and caused all of society's ills.
You also ended with an appeal to emotion, "Just ask the wives..." Instead of again supporting your claim that alcohol is more damaging with evidence.
To be clear, I'm not saying alcohol is or isn't more damaging. I'm saying that there isn't any evidence in these comments (yours and others) to support a claim of "X being worse than Y".
That's a line straight out of the temperance era.
I don't know why I needed to be more explicit....
I say this as the grandchild of an alcoholic. Alcohol is the problem. You're right that there're underlying things, but they lie there, just beneath the surface, mostly untouched and undisturbing without alcohol.
By your definition ecstasy is a social drug or any drug at a rave is social (Note I have never seen MDMA turn anti-social).
In my experience most drugs are “social” - the heroin users I knew were a tight crowd! Weed is definitely social for those that partake.
Serve cocaine, MDMA and meth at a wedding and everybody will have a social blast too.
I’m genuinely curious how you define sociability of a drug or substance. I know alcohol is detrimental to society at large. On an individual basis, I find it quite attractive for social gatherings.
Alcohol is deeply socially destructive - we know the stereotypical examples of damage in the the poor and the indigenous communities. The examples of damage in middle-class homes of the wealthy (e.g. doctors) and the average working class (tradies and nurses) is much less visible.
The words “social” and “alcohol” are immiscible.
I have an alcohol free home (I have seen too many friends slowly change from one small drink a night to a problem within a few years.
I have seen too many devastating consequences of “social” drinking to think it is safe. Of course we all mostly do unsafe things regularly!
But we have learned that the social costs of prohibition of those drugs is higher than the benefit to society.
The same may be true of certain classes of hallucinogenic substances, especially since people tragically turn to solvents and extremely toxic substances as substitutes.
> war on drugs has been so expensive
> we need to try something radically different
You want something different and then advocate for the same?
Edgy, I would definitely have posted that on myspace when I was 14. Of course, that's not true. We are not hunter-gatherers, or pre-industrial farmers. We have abundance of all of life's necessities and even more.
>We only create misery by “helping” people that don’t want help.
You clearly haven't met any addicts, only observed them from a sneering distance and concluded whatever you wanted to conclude.
Suffice to say: I have. Several people who were on self-destructive paths, of whom you could have said "well fuck him, the fucker doesn't want help and is a burden to those around him, why should I waste money and effort with him?". With the necessary support they are now entirely different persons.
>Provide basic unregulated housing, not unlike squattable buildings. Set up AI monitored surveillance and prohibit attempts to form any kind of exploitative enterprise. Self registration with biometric access. Provide fentanyl dispensers. Come through once a day and dispose of the dead.
I sure am glad you don't make public policy, but you might have a future in dystopian fiction.
I didn't get the impression that the parent was against help. He explicitly mentioned providing rehab programs to those who wanted them.
They already move out of housing to seek out abandoned buildings because their choices are incompatible with society at large.
My idea is an attempt to align incentives for a better outcome.
And by default, I mean if you take no action. If you don’t believe me, try it some time. Do literally nothing to improve or maintain your living situation and see if that does not lead to misery.
People up inhere acting like I’m locking up addicts in death camps lol, but if you read my comment you can clearly see that what I am advocating is to let people do what they want without screwing up society at large.
> Honestly, if a person isn’t up for it, we need to stop trying to convince them to stay around and be miserable. Elective suicide should be a basic right, and drugs are one way out. We only create misery by “helping” people that don’t want hep.
What an absolutely miserable outlook on life.
All life is precious and fleeting. We should respect it.
I believe life is wonderful and precious… but it is , by default, misery.
If you do nothing (the default condition) to sustain or improve your existence, you will be miserable. That is the never ending tyranny of imperative action.
That is the fundamental nature of life, and not everyone is up for it. And that’s ok.
You're making LOTS of assumptions here.
I would be genuinely greatful if you could provide me with realistic examples of where this statement is incorrect.
The only ones I can think of are ones where someone else does the sustenance and improvement of your existence, like in the case of being a child or a ward of the state, perhaps? Also obviously where you are paying others to do so, but there you have actually caused this to happen and therefore are “doing” it.
I would suggest that the fundamental issue with your assumptions is a blurring of the lines when it comes to the objective and subjective. Specifically, nature and certain realms of human existence ARE objectively "harsh", unforgiving, uncomfortable, etc. However, that does not mean that all who exist or have existed in such realms are miserable.
If you've not seen this before, this show is just one (of a great many materials not so prevalent in modern western intensely consumer / advertising / so-called "achievement"-oriented cultures) reference with some real views of massive differences in (subjective) experience people can have across various "objective" realities:
https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/83990-the-kindness-diaries?lan...
In any case, your policy proposals earlier would, IMO, add up to poor outcomes. Not because they are inherently so bad / worse than what's been tried - more just due to the nature of the problem. Our tools / these sorts of tools are incredibly blunt compared to the complexity of the problem. And, trying to put in place some of what you propose, would definitely harm some people - in part simply in making the changes.
I am not claiming to be able to do any better, though, for sure.
But, I agree with you that my off the cuff policy proposal has many flaws and would harm some people. I think it might do less harm than good, but without a good bit of (probably unethical) a/b testing I’m really not sure.
Also what really makes people struggle with suicide can be quite different then just drug use.
Suicide thinking is an inflammation of the body that happens to all creatures when put under extreme stress. Their body is starting to control their mind. They aren't imagining pain, their body is literally in pain. Figuring what is causing the stress and how to reduce it is key.
Instead of saying oh they don't want to live, look at what is going on with their body. Overworked people get really suicidal would you want to get an exit ramp for them?
A lot of suicidal people also have been through a lot of unprocessed trauma that plain old consulting won't fix (as someone who went to 10 psychologist I personally find most of it useless as well, few people understand CPTSD and in fact I have had some psychologist blaming me for my problems and really badly mislabeling me. I was smart enough not to believe them but a lot of people might not. Most people don't understand what's like to live in bad circumstances for years they just think it's a personality disorder. This psychologist also never even asked if I grew up with a family history of violence because I seemed too normal in some ways. They were really bad at their job but at the time I thought if I could bully myself into changing myself with this psychologist help, maybe I could improve... It's only after some family died I realized what I was actually going through and found a term for it.)
Also by this logic of addicted users don't want to change it's like saying poor people choose to be poor, it's really hard to get out of systems and thought patterns to improve your circumstances. People spiral for a reason and it can be tough to overcome. Also really smart people can still be poor, being born in the wrong country or at the wrong time, or in the wrong circumstances etc etc can make a lot of difference. Having empathy for people and helping them understand themselves can make a lot of difference. I've helped a lot of suicidal people improve their circumstances (though it's hard), and it can be popular to be suicidal as a cultural thing too especially the more disconnected and trapped people feel. With suicide rates increasing you have to understand we have some systemic issues going on, it's not their fault they feel bad most of the time, it's just a bad system they are in, change the system change the people. Especially the youth. Also almost drug use abuse is because people feel disconnected from others. Which is largely a systemic issue now with loneliness shock rocketing.
Basically, that is, do everything you say while NOT punishing the public drug use and you just eating the social cost of that as part of life's natural consequences (or else, if you do criminalize it, make a criminal conviction for it both not affect the availability of rehab at all and make the conviction vanish entirely upon successful completion of the rehab and then eat and endure permanently the social consequences of THAT on the "life is misery by default" logic).
I’ve seen it first hand. Really nice guys, had no issues or violent tendencies, then got a hold of alcohol or drugs and it completely changed them. In the worst cases it went to the ultimate extreme and they wound up killing others.
Once you realize this, your perspective on the laissez-faire attitude changes. The reality is that some people are fundamentally incompatible with drugs and alcohol and society needs to put up boundaries to prevent collateral damage, even if we were OK with them killing themselves. I think some drugs are worse than others (For example I’ve never seen someone get violent after smoking Cannabis) but messing with your brain chemistry is not a trivial thing like the pro-legalize-everything camp wants to proclaim.
Not only that, but most drug users aren't addicts.
To the general public, when they hear the words "drug user" they immediately equate that with "addict", and many can't even imagine that people could use drugs and not get addicted.
But that's not true, as addicts are a small minority of drug users.
Drug policy affects far more than just addicts. Lots of non-addicted users are affected too.
Do you have any reliable data to back up that claim? In my experience users who purport to not be addicts are indeed addicts in massive denial about their poor choices.
While some % of those are people who got help and quit in the past year, or people on the start of a downward spiral/addiction, plenty of those seem to just be infrequent users.
Unless the drug kills you so frequently/quickly that you can't sustain use for long or is rapidly gaining users for a new addiction crisis, the level of greater than monthly users should be higher if most of those infrequent users are going to become addicts.
https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt3...
You can further see that the spread of yearly vs monthly use is closer for substances typically considered more addictive and wider for those less thought to be. (not a lot of LSD addicts out there, relatively speaking).
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My experience is that a lot of people are very quiet about their drug use outside the environment where they dabble in it and never mention it at all in company where they're uncertain about how it'll be viewed, so I also suspect that you may not recognize most of those people as people who'd use drugs at all.
I'm a big live music person and being around people using drugs somewhat comes with the territory, especially festival-type environments. But most of the people I've met at those things don't do much of those substances otherwise aside from possibly weed. They've got their once or twice a year time of hitting up the party drugs for their weekend of fun + music, but that's it.
Different drugs have wildly different addiction rates. Most people who use drugs are using the non-addictive stuff.
However, the people we traditionally view as addicts are almost certainly addicts even if they pretend they could quit anytime.
I've known a lot of folks that use hallucinogens: You aren't addicted to those, in general.
I've known a lot of folks with a liking to cocaine, but they can't afford to use more than a couple times a year. Or it just isn't something they want to feel every day. This applies to a lot of drug use.
I've met a lot of folks that only use drugs (or alcohol) when they have a sitter for their children.
You probably don't have reliable data to back up your claim either, and have the added mental block of deciding that all of the folks have poor choices. And unfortunately, you aren't using what you know about, say, alcohol and applying that to other druts. Most folks that drink alcohol aren't addicts or alcoholics. Even if they drink more than you, it doesn't mean they are alcoholics.
This feels like it could be a direct result of no funding.
Drug overdoses are a nationwide problem in the USA. Mississippi also had a 49% increase in overdoses in 2020. Shelter is a basic human need and depriving people of it on the grounds that they might overdose doesn't seem like it follows. I know plenty of addicts who take care of their things just fine. They're addicted to coffee and alcohol and cigarettes. It's possible that the problem is not the drug itself but the social stigma attached to the drug.
Although I suspect both you and I know people addicted to other things, and we are simply unaware because we don't see any of the outward signs that we associate with "bad drug" addiction.
I assure you there is a difference between coffee/cigarettes and methamphetamine beyond just stigma.
Coffee and tobacco both improve your mental capabilities without short-term downsides. No one’s been fired for showing up with a coffee or tobacco buzz and being more productive.
Very few people would rob their friends and families for mocha money were Starbucks suddenly illicit.
Alcohol is obviously less defensible as many people do end up on the streets over it.
Back then most people I knew were using it, in the same way they would use an energy drink, and there were nearly no problems aside from the morons who wouldn't stop parting for a week at a time (but those folks would do the same with Any substance).
Really... Where I grew up the literal mayor was doing coke on the regular and also owned many businesses including the baseball team... And so were most of the successful people doing lots of drugs particularly uppers.
What happened was as they pushed enforcement against the drugs the quality decreased and the cost went up, posing a more immediate health risk and inducing crimes respectively.
I know from first hand experience with both the products and the propel that the biggest issue is the mere fact of thier illegality and extreme markups.
A key is to not have the government view the drug as a profit centre, as Canada did with pot, as that only grows the black market and strengthens them rather than destroy them.
I think you severely underestimate the importance of coffee to the stability of many people's psychology....
I know I'd be far more prone to violent outbursts during the first half of my day if my brain wasn't jump started by coffee.... Literally, I suffer from sleep drunkenness and without coffee my first four hours I'm little more than a drunken moron who is prone to irrational outbursts of instinctive rage at sensory triggers (loudness, brightness, unexpected touch etc).
For me that definitely part of a disorder resultant from a combo of genetics and multiple brain injuries but given what I've seen of others I highly doubt it's any different for many.
A quickly accessed link kind of supports this https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2014/08/22/neighborhood-in...
Theres a reason tea and coffee shops were the birth places of revolutions: Coffee stimulates the mind and brings clarity and calm many can't find absent it. The absence would be felt in increased consumption of alcohol and the resulting problems.
And really, do you think banning coffee would actually eliminate it? No. It would just become another meth and people would be killed to protect the industry etc, just like with every other substance.
Disbelieve? Look at chinese "medicine" and it's absurd contraband items that are still ridiculously prevalent despite there being literally zero effects from it, no high no health boost just bullshit. And still we have poachers and traffickers murdering thousands of people a year over that shit...
But coffee, it's an exception /s
I didn't say meth is like an energy drink, I said these people Used it Like an energy drink...
Reading comprehension, it's important.
And btw ephedra laced drinks were the norm at the time, so they were actually far more similar than now.
400,000 US service members died in WW2.
I think the problem has become so large we are basically in a state of denial and can't put the size of the problem in the proper context.
This is entirely driven by funding. The article explained its a multi year wait for treatment (funding issue) and so the police aren't making people appear before the commissions because all they can do is release them.
Meanwhile, the article says when it was funded 20 years ago, it effectively reduced the amount of heroin used.
What's wrong with having a "drug culture" exactly?
"Meanwhile, overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent."
First, Portland is not Portugal.
Second, are the overdoses happening in people who use legal drugs?
From what I understand, overdoses usually happen when people don't know the dose they're getting, which is a consequence of them using illegal drugs which have no quality control and no reliable labeling as to dosage. So not only do you not know what you're getting, but may get a dose that's much larger than you anticipated.
Having access to legal, high quality drugs which are clearly labeled should eliminate most of the risks of unintentional overdose.
The simple fact is that after drug decriminalisation in 1999 the number of (1) new HIV infections and (2) overdose deaths fell to less than half in a couple years.
After cuts in funding, it started performing worse. Who would have think.
It’s not surprising that many addicts of other drugs don’t seek treatment.
It’s like obesity. Just stop eating so much! Just stop drinking! Just stop smoking crack! Just say no!
How well is that going?
Human psychology is nuts. Big is beautiful! Track marks are sexy!
I have no idea how you solve this sort of thing. Does anyone?
Solving drug addiction as a society in the world is possible if the western world had the political capital to do so. But like you said, human psychology is nuts. the thing to look at is Hong Kong back in '97. 1897, that is. It was a British colony in the wake of the Opium wars, for 100 years. The allure of being high on opium was a significant drag on the economy and the Chinese government wasn't putting up with that. While they lost the war, and Hong Kong's current political situation is fraught, a country fighting an enemy, the British, is able to unite in a way that war against concepts like war or poverty can't. (Communism is an exception because there were countries with that system to unite against.
We'll note that opium dens still exist, but not in the same capacity as before, and while China also has its share of drug addicts, they don't have downtown Philly or San Francisco.
So how do we fight it? Well, a war on drugs, but not one fought by men with guns and illegalization and demonization, but one fought by therapists and psychologists, with harm reduction and governmental and societal support. It's a radically different shape of society if the government genuinely cares about its people. You'd have to give everyone housing and feed everybody. and not just a subsistence living but thriving community. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can't be had without a life worth living, and a life without hope for a better future is not worth living.
Does anyone know how Norway has handled drugs and homelessness?
The reason I ask is that we should probably compare funding and outcomes between Portugal and Norway, no?
Two things are needed to change human behavior:
1. A strong deterrent
2. An equally strong support system (ie. Healthcare, housing, food, basic income)
You can’t do both of these without a strong financial investment unless…
You’re Singapore.
If the government in Norway don't provide shelter, it is the same as directly saying "we don't mind these people die".
I grew up in a top drug spot in Portugal. Things were bad, really bad. I would say that worse was impossible, every extended family had drug problems. After the early 90's peak, slowly it got better, addicts' younger brothers and neighbors had real examples. Doing drugs was not "cool" anymore. That generation was eradicated from my home town (many died by counterfeit drugs or overdose, the rest after jail and detoxs eventually moved somewhere else to start over).
Politicians, as always, take positive results as their own but their influence here was negligible. The only positive policy was free syringe exchange. It certainly had a positive impact on AIDS control. Now drugs are coming back (not nearly as bad as once was). Younger generations didn't witness the human degradation as my generation did. It's a cycle.
Like I said before, politicians always take positive results as their own but their influence here was negligible. I was there living next door, the cycle just passed. Now it's coming back and the policies are exactly the same but if you prefer to romanticize it, go ahead.
So you have some people not having a thing, and compare it to torturing millions (hundreds of thousands?) of innocent people.
So do I. That's why I prefer to lock 1% instead of locking the other 99%.
My life experience took me here. Yours took you somewhere else. We just have different worldviews that will never match.
It’s simply an optimization problem. Prison is horrendously expensive, and people on the street have real externalities for everyone in the area.
If anything the complexity is why it’s an optimization problem.
I assume the other commenter is referring to using "(((@name)))" on Twitter, and similar patterns, which is some social media thing I don't understand. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_parentheses.
Temptative hypothesis 1: People have less roots than in Europe, so they don’t belong somewhere, and have weak ties with close family and no ties with extended family, so they move, and when they fall off their life, there is no social safety net?
Temptative hypothesis 2: Americans classify any bad mood as a mental issue?
Temptative 3: Medical aid is too expensive when you’re, by definition, fallen off at the feet of the social ladder?
Temptative 4: Capitalism separates people? Financial success separates people?
Temptative 5: CIA needed off-network money to fund ISIS, so they traded drugs in Columbia, sold to poor schmocks in Texas, and got the money to pay ISIS? (everyone is a victim here)
Combine that with wealth stratification, Hussle culture, and the complete lack of any real social safety net and if anything I'm surprised we're doing as well as we are.
I don't think it's a single issue by far, but if I had to peg one aspect as the worst offender, it's isolationism. There's strong correlation between drug use, depression, suicide, and lower life expectancy in places with power population density (Alaska, Noth Dakota, pretty much any small rustbelt or mountain or southern town)
When there's nothing to fill the emptiness, people turn to drugs and overeating just to feel something.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2022472118
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States...
The rat in isolation was drawn to the bottle with cocaine water. When the rat was in a cage with activites and other rats, lost the preference for the cocaine water.
Doing drugs in isolation is a coping mechanism, doing drugs with others is social bonding
I recommend you check out reddit r/LateStageCapitalism .
There is so much to be said about how fuck up our world is, I don't wanna start or i'll write a brick.
Elon Musk said recently that school is a joke, and that he do home schooling. Well, he is not the first one to have said it, but he is damn right. Idriss Aberkane has some very good conferences on the subject.
In USA, compared to France, you can add the issue of student debt (slavery). And the city layout being made for cars, public transportation or bikes are scarce, meaning young ones have to heavely rely on parents to do any activitie.
Oh... and your president is not just bad and malevolent, like in France, he is also senile. But like in France, a lot of citizen have voted for him.
Finnaly, who is really sick here ?
"It is not a sign of good mental health to be well adapted to a sick society."
[1] https://nlihc.org/resource/study-finds-affordable-housing-re...
I believe addiction is a disease, but treatment is elusive. Some have no desire to stop. There are also frequently other mental or emotional problems. Just feeding addiction's most obvious symptom (by continual drug use) does nothing - see this article.
I doubt whether there will ever be a neat and tidy "solution". Eventually the healthy part of society will have enough and some action will be taken, like prohibition or war on drugs, etc. Then it will wax the other way again.
Then imagine you've taken something that infinitely transforms your world and makes you feel amazing to such a degree that's absolutely unimaginable to someone who hasn't tried some of these substances ("better than sex" is an extreme understatement). All your pain is gone, all your misery forgotten, amazing vistas open before you, all is good.
After that brief stay in paradise, you come crashing down and back in to your miserable life. Everything is as before, your passion is back, only you now know it's possible for you to get back to that exalted state, to escape that prison of a life you've been living in, even if for a moment.
Is it evidence of a disease for someone who's gone through this to desperately want to experience that escape again? To be free and feel great?
Is the cause of such a desire -- the misery, the poverty, the hopelessness, the fantastic way these substances make you feel and the escape they offer -- can all that be justly summed up in the word "disease", or is there something else going on?
Many addicts I've known and seen come from stable environments and it isbecause of their incessant drug use that they end up poor, homeless and degraded.
Of course some addicts definitely start in "crushing poverty" but many do not. It affects people from every background, every social strata.
If your hypothesis were correct than the housing and support programs would work. They don't.
Treatment is elusive because it isn't possible in the traditional sense.
The phenomenon is the exploitation of two things: the vulnerability of humans to chemicals, and the inability of communities to protect their free spaces from the outcomes of humans abusing chemicals.
Free spaces are a sacrifice zone. Legalisation of addictive drugs, at scale, will destroy what we value as community.
If we legalised all drugs, we would need to protect our communities, not abandon our communities to people destroying themselves.
It's almost like if NGOs that live off the existence of drug abuse didn't want to kill the cash cow. That's another case of why such public services shouldn't be externalized.
When using is a crime then police does it job by picking up addicts and incarcerating them. (Which might be seen as an extreme form of stochastic harm reduction, with overall very harmful externalities.) When it's not, then these needle exchanges do probabilistic prevention of specific deadly circumstances.
I don't understand why this is a problem. That is very sensible and a reasonable place to put most of your efforts.
Why not on economic hardship around the pandemic?
Am I the only one having the feeling that drog use was picked to blame for some of the troubles experienced (not all, visible use must be a burden, just like the visible alcoholismn on streets and related ill behaviour) and the article should have explored the alternative views some more.
There's the Singapore solution. "Singapore executes man for trafficking two pounds of cannabis", April 23, 2023.[1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/25/asia/singapore-cannabis-execu...
Obviously, the solution is somewhere between these two extremes. The softer end seems to be loosing though.
Take the recent cases of human trafficking through the EU border (the Serbian-Hungarian in particular), over the past years about 600 traffickers were picked up by police and sentenced to so and so years in prison. And ... did it do anything to the trafficking numbers? Unlikely, because these low-level mules are also desperate individuals, not the ones organizing things and collecting the money.
Decriminalizing removes that punishment misery, so total misery drops significantly. But the behavior it was suppressing - the drug use - rebounds in the absence of punishment, and the misery level creeps back up.
I don’t buy that it’s the handoff to NGOs that caused this. From the article’s description, the NGOs appear to be implementing the decriminalization policy much more faithfully than the police did - needles and supervision are provided by the NGOs “without judgment”, while I very much doubt the police were entirely without judgment in the months after decriminalization.
Punishment does deter things. Whether it is the only thing that can is a different matter. But I think a lot of those who want alternatives need to get out of the "punishment does not deter" narrative, which is about as silly as saying that oil and gas don't provide energy because they are bad for the environment.
Applied at a crude level, this tells you that removing punishment misery will cause addiction misery to rise (which is an important refinement - a “total misery accounting” perspective that doesn’t have this included will believe that removing punishment misery would leave addiction misery unchanged, thus improving total misery).
Applied at a more sophisticated level, this gets you analyzing incremental changes in punishment or addiction policy: e.g. this new law adds x punishment misery, how much does it reduce addiction misery by? If the answer is “less than x”, you now have some objective basis for concluding this policy is “needlessly cruel”.
You can't do this. It is neither ethical or practical. There's plenty we could do as a society that may hypothetically "reduce misery", but we don't insofar as it violates their rights.
It's not even possible to do. This is highly subjective. For instance, how do you rate the genocide that's baked into prohibition? Does that just not count because you don't respect a part of our subculture? What about people that are now in pain and misery, but we're maybe hurting their health with illegal drugs (although some of them seemed to be doing fine and not increasing their dosages).
Does the fact that they were previously dependent on drugs, somehow negate their pain, or inability to function well. Is being addicted to drugs some kind of weird nightmare scenario, like the matrix, where the subject is always worse off?
And selling drugs should not be a fabulous glamorous advertised social endevour like marijuana in the USA.
Drugs should be sold like tobacco in Australia…. behind the counter, zero advertising, zero branding.
1) illegal drugs are still illegal, just like now.
2) the quality of the illegal drugs rise significantly if sourced from reliable, regulated manufactures
3) the "blood" cost of production drops precipitously
4) the end user cost drops as well.
Now without support, those addicted will still flounder. However they won't need to do as much crime to fund it (much better for society, worse for the individual)
Some "meds" are more dangerous and addictive than some "drugs".
So what, tourists now dictate what's good or bad in a country, not the native population?
Get outta here Washington Post
It's better because at least it stops criminalizing addicts, but it still enables shady people to profit from and attract new users.
Please just allow pharmacies to sell the drugs in boring packages without any advertisement whatsoever.
Homeless and about-to-become homeless addicts are at the bottom of the food chain, with extremely limited agency. Their choices are basically improve (v. difficult), tread water (slightly less difficult) or die (not difficult at all.)
Politicians who are addicts can create and enforce disastrous irrational policies on an entire country.
Self-indulgence and law-breaking are one of the most popular benefits of privilege, and the fact that many "serious people" hide this behind a veneer of upper class respectability doesn't change how toxic this culture is.
I guarantee that any country that institutes mandatory drug tests for politicians, CEOs and senior executives, the entire financial industry, lawyers and judges, and other senior officials, is suddenly going to find itself making much more rational and sane decisions.
If anyone thinks I'm exaggerating, here's the former Chancellor of the UK.
> Robert Carr served as Eden's Parliamentary Private Secretary and I have been much influenced by his comments:
> ‘I find it difficult to accept the judgement that Anthony's health did not have a decisive influence at least on the conduct of his policy. I agree that he might well have pursued the same basic policy had he been well, but I find it very hard to believe that he would have made such obvious miscalculations in its execution both in the political and the military spheres.’
> Lord William Deedes, the distinguished journalist, who was also a Minister in Eden's government, accurately said on television in 2004 that during the Suez crisis, Eden ‘under prescription had, as many did, and still do, barbiturates, I think, to assist rest and sleep etc. and amphetamines sometimes for a little bit of a pick up’, and agreed that this was what was called ‘uppers and downers’.31 That combination is contained in Drinamyl, identified by Eden's own doctor as the drug he was on. Drinamyl is now very rarely used, as the medical profession have become more aware of their effect on judgement, energy and mood. Deedes’ account, however, contrasts with Eden's wife's view that he was not taking ‘uppers and downers’ and was only taking anything like it (Benzedrine) in the last fortnight before he resigned.
I'd love this for NYC. I'm getting pretty sick of smelling weed all day on the streets.
Also, why was it working for a few years and now it's not anymore? Could it be that the pandemic and economic downturn caused more people to turn to drugs and reduced funding? Ah, they hid that answer in the last paragraph...
> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
This is addressed in the article.
It should be telling that during protests, white people were helping protestors by forming a “shield” because they knew the optics of police beating white people would be distasteful.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/white-protesters-form-human-...
Our goal was never to stop drug use, we know it's impossible, but to both make it survivable by victims, stop the violence on the citizens who did nothing wrong but walk past a drug victim, and also stop the spread of the victimization (that's why we hesitate so strongly about Marijuana: there's a 100% chance in increases its victims rather than reduce them).
Minorities are not the only drug victims, a lot of the victims are also in people of the mainstream cultural segment of the population. I'd even argue these victims make it all the more important to help control the problem since they have richer parents who hold more power and vote etc.
Don't lose sight of the point, the evil is the drug, not the police, in the drug fight. The victims of the drug trades are killed by the drug in 99% of the deaths, and by police abuse for the rest. It is not a police problem first and foremost.
Minorities are often the victims of the Justice system in the US. When drugs were in an “inner city” problem. It was all about “poor morals” and “absentee fathers”.
When it happened in “rural America” it was the fault of those evil “illegal immigrants” and the drug companies and “let’s treat it like a disease”.
“ It is not a police problem first and foremost.”
It is when you’re targeted because of the color of your skin.
It's like if we presented corpses of dead drivers on the main streets – I bet it'd greatly lower overspeeding and drunk driving
"Its that good!" "It's so nice! Even when you know it kills you, you still dont want to stop! Not to mention! Quiting is hard! Real hard! Dont try to quit. You will only suffer."
That is the narrative that they push.
The human mind is Strange sometimes.
[1]: <https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-who-smoke>
Whether or not visibility normalizes drug use behaviors, I couldn't say. They were normalized before I was born and I'll be 50 next year.
Visibility is the most important metric of a policy in a democracy. Here in China, it's not ! But are you ready to tell people their opinion doesn't matter because you know the result and the result is good despite what they see with their own eyes ? It's hard to swallow here, might be hard where you live too !
> still below European averages.
Does the data actually support the arguments made in this article?
I hate to say it but.....it sounds like it's still better than the alternative?
Then you do something like criminalize drug users, numbers get worse, but now you can claim is all fault of drug users for doing something illegal. You are doing "something", but they don't cooperate.
so maybe the portuguese policy could use some tweaking.
That doesn't seem very angry? Kinda exactly what I'd expect from a street salesperson. Your best bet is to ignore them entirely, the second you interact you're a fish on a hook, and it's their job to reel you in.
Angry is the Colombians who will suffocate you at knifepoint for not giving them cocaine.
Total prohibition, prohibition of possession & prohibition of production vs decriminalization of possession & prohibition of production, means that the end product is expensive, difficult to obtain and dangerous to sell. In both cases the outlaws are normally the people selling it.
In case it was legal to produce it, poppy fields in Afghanistan would face serious competition from Portugal, and their profits should dwindle. I mean, American army weapons have be funded somehow.
I'm Portuguese and lived in Lisbon for 12 years. Trust me, you can't buy drugs from those guys
What I don't get about this: most people seem to know (think?) this. So you'd think these guys have no income at all because no-one is trusting them so no-one buys from them. Yet after decades they're still there, in a lot of cities. So there must be something which works in this system. I find it hard to believe they survive off the occasional sell to a tourist. I mean, could be, but seems far fatched to me?
They scammed me when I was a kid (I wanted weed).
Don't you think I know what I'm talking about? You can buy drugs is Lisbon of course but real drug dealers aren't approaching thousands of people in the open streets of downtown Lisbon everyday!
Police leaves these guys alone because there is no real crime. Scamming tourists is hard to persecute. Not worth it!
They sell a lot because they will force people to buy whenever possible. Most people buy it to be left alone.
> Police leaves these guys alone because there is no real crime. Scamming tourists is hard to persecute. Not worth it!
Often there is crime: forcing people to buy it's petty crime but most will not complain unless there is violence. It's nearly impossible to jail them with the actual political zeitgeist, making it a waste of time and money. This impunity leaves room for retaliation also.
Drugs are everywhere and who sells them is quite surprising. The war on drugs will never be won whilst life is not brilliant and life is getting worse for many, and they wont hesitate to "drop" you ie kill you if they know you have reported them to the police, at least, thats what they say in roundabout ways.
If royalty and other rich people who own country estates, think they have a right to rule, these drug dealers people will claim they have a right to do what they do. They just challenge the hypocrisy in the system.
Now those guys are gone, but there are basically food trucks selling pot gummies with licenses.
There were homeless sleeping on heating vents both times.
When they fully funded their rehab and social service program, the system worked.
Then they reduced funding and seem surprised the programs don’t work any more.
> A newly released national survey suggests the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001
So, No.
> Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage. In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last. Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use.
> overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.
> Residents have launched U.S.-style neighborhood watches and hired private security guards — something exceedingly rare in Europe.
> Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022
I wonder what else changed between 2021 and 2022 that could have caused robbery in public spaces to spike.
So many things have changed in Portugal over the last decade, Lisbon and Porto in particular, that looking just at drug policy is insufficient. In particular, cost of living and immigration from poorer countries (both correlated with “number of desperate people”) have risen significantly.
> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.
You'll notice that 2012 comes before 2019.
Why did it take nearly a decade to happen, then happen all at once?
Seems like something else changed more recently than the funding in 2012.
Well, by that logic clearly decriminalization wasn't the cause. Why would the negative effect take nearly two decades to happen, then happen all at once? Seems like something else changed more recently than the decriminalization in 2001.
----
Snarkiness aside, I find these discussions on HN to be mostly pointless and circular, precisely for this reason. There's very little actually substantive discussion happening under this article. A trend was noticed, one side has an explanation, the other side says "nah, I don't think that's it" and then we go in circles saying "hmmm... doesn't sound convincing to me" and meme a bit about Singapore and Seattle. It's HN at its worst.
That this comment exists almost immediately after another comment further upstream saying "well, of course we wouldn't expect to see the negative effects of decriminalization immediately" to me sums up how entirely arbitrary online arguments about decriminalization often are.
Much of Europe was locked down making travel often impossible. All that really says is there is a lot of drug tourism.
Similar to speeding tickets in the US. Speeding is against the law, but minor infractions are not criminal offenses.
For instance, Sweden implemented an extremely restrictive drug policy focused on scaring people from trying drugs at all, at the expense of existing users who were shunned and penalized harshly. It now has one of the highest overdose mortality rates in Europe and a well-known gang violence problem that’s unprecedented in its history or in any of the otherwise similar countries.
I personally think these “clever” policies where you try to optimize for a proxy metric are just moralistic and unscientific garbage. Not to mention the consequences of giving the task (and the funding) to the criminal justice system first. If we transferred the issues of smoking cessation or alcoholism to the police, what would we expect to happen?
Of particular interest to note is the commenter’s perception that this spike is less bad as in the 90s. Not trying to draw any conclusions based on this but it seems just as presumptive to believe that decriminalization has had this negative effect, regardless of how long it takes to “kick in” so to speak.
There's a great debate between grenn greenwald and the Bush drug Czar on this topic.
Pros and cons end up firmly on Portugal and Glenn's side, but it's not the side of fear or profit.
What were they supposed to in a different country? Arrest the guy, spend money putting him in jail, wait til he gets back out and repeat?
Let you sleep on the streets smoking crack ?
treatment for the chemical addiction, and psychological therapy for the trauma around addiction
I said above:
>I don't know much about this area.
What, those aren't the priorities of Jeff Bezos? Huh....
Surprised to learn that, given the rosy conditions at amazon warehouses.
Policy A: No forced treatment: 10% of addicts attempt treatment with a 10% success rate = 1% overall success rate.
Policy B: Forced treatment: 10% of addicts attempt treatment with a 10% success rate = 1% + 20% of addicts forced into treatment with a 5% success rate = 1% = 2% overall success rate.
Should she have been arrested and jailed for committing what I and many others would regard as depraved behavior? And if not, why the street addict and not the railcar ripper?
1) If someone's addiction leads to crime, then punish the crime when they commit it. Don't make the pre-crine a crime. Instead of preventing crimes, now you've multiplied them.
2) If drugs weren't ruinously expensive due to their illegality, there would be much less need for addicts to turn to crime. You don't normally hear about alcohol, cigarette or coffee addicts going on crime sprees to support their habits.
3) There's evidence that responding with properly funded support and treatment is cheaper and leads to better outcomes than a massive carceral complex.
4) We can discourage a practice with lighter punitive measures than prison. Running a red light is a rampant traffic infraction, and potentially deadly to boot, yet we don't typically punish it with jail time. It would be massively unproductive to do so. We typically fine people and/or give them "points" on their license. Similarly if needed, we could discourage drugs with fines, taxes, restricting privileges, mandated treatment or social shaming instead of incarceration.
Right, so let's punish people for those actual crimes.
If sleeping on the street is a crime, enforce that crime. Don't pretend that if we magically banned all of the hypothetical reasons people might commit that crime that it will eliminate that crime. We can't enforce every-fucking-thing - and we have proven conclusively that we can never effectively ban popular street drugs - so let's focus instead on crimes with victims and enforce them more aggressively.
Read up about the dangers of second and third degree smoking.
> The same way someone drinking a beer in public doesn't bother me. How could it?
Perhaps those who've had family or friends killed by drunk driving or drunken homicide might have something else to say.
A guy I used to date was rear-ended while waiting at a red light by someone who was texting while driving. It was an extremely serious wreck (the person who hit him did not brake at all, ge was so absorbed in his phone), and my ex was lucky to survive it.
But people texting on their phones in public places doesn't bother him. He is not in favor of making SMS illegal. That would be utterly absurd.
They're not interested in responsible driving, they're just looking for any excuse for their sadism.
Note that the discussion isn't even about dangerous driving, that's a complete tangent.
It's about whether drug use _per se_ is criminalized. Not even legal, just whether the remedy for drug use should be help or punishment. Portugal never decriminalize or legalised vehicular homicide.
But texting in public is legal, and having a beer in public is legal. Just because something is dangerous while driving doesn't mean it's harmful under all other circumstances.
The offence in that case isn't the drink, it's the driving. Maybe we should ban driving.
Maybe, but they aren't the folks we should be listening to. I don't drive: I'm pretty sure I'll be OK drinking a beer in public. My decision shouldn't be influenced by those folks.
I don't see many of those people pushing a robust, fare-free public transportation system to help with those either.
I suspect you think the cause is the alcohol: But realistically, it is that people don't always plan ahead. As far as drunk driving is concerned, robust transport would be a step in the right direction. Especially in the countryside and small towns - in the US, these are filled with bars but no transport.
The link with homocides isn't nearly as clear. More people drink alcohol than other drugs and from what I could find, it might be a part of a series of events than anything else, at least in the US. If it doesn't hold to other places, then I'll dismiss it. Prohibiting alcohol in public simply isn't going to help, and we've seen what complete prohibition does. Do you have an actual solution that doesn't drive it underground? I'd personally start with improving people's lives in general so that there is less stress all around - at least that stuff we can do something about.
Odds are there are no studies to reference because the entire idea is idiotic on its face and no one would ever both studying it.
It's entirely possible to have chaep prescription asthma medication regulated by low cost national health care subsidised doctors appointments.
Sure I do. A doctor has told me as much on at least two different occasions. Once when I was a young child and again later.
But because I lost my insurance I didn't get treatment in-between, so I have to get rediagnosed. Jim other words, I'm just going to be relying on caffeine when breathing gets hard.
Where I live pharmacists can diagnose and prescribe for some conditions. Other countries have similar systems that allow lower risk medications to be prescribed by people other than doctors for low risk conditions.
Ultimately, if you can't afford the doctors visit, I wonder if you can afford the medication. At least some asthma medication is expensive.
https://www.nationalasthma.org.au/understanding-asthma/treat...
AS I understand it you can get an inhaler most of the time w/out seeing a doctor, you can get an inhaler if you really need it, but you do need to see a doctor to keep getting an inhaler so that the progression of your symptoms can be checked.
Australia loves epidemiology and keeping tabs on treatments, progressions and outcomes.
It's very little to do with spying on individuals and very much to do with keeping tabs on broad health trends and tailoring bulk medication orders, etc.
If you're not in Australia then the intent of Australian health care procedures doesn't apply.
Either way you might consider actively lobbying to change the behaviour of whatever health care sytem you have.
I don't see the point in lobbying. I've long understood that any opinion I have about how society should be run is worthless because people might agree in detail, but they won't agree once the scope is broadened into actually doing something.
Somebody comes out with a story about how somebody was too stupid to use the thing correctly and ended up hurt, so it should've stayed banned and that's it. People see the negative sides of taking action, but they rarely consider the cost of inaction. I don't even think the problem is with politicians, but rather just people.
Do you think people feel safe on this street? Just because you personally may feel safe, consider that you may be personally blessed with youth and health. Does an elderly woman with a cane and a purse feel safe?
People high on crack are unpredictable. They may try to rob you because that was the last crack rock they had, and they are also out of money.
And if people don't feel safe on the street, then people who can start to move away. Then you have a 'drain' problem on a societal level.
Do you believe your own propaganda? That's the most simplistic, nonsensical, DARE-level logic I have seen in this comment thread yet.
Also, how about you present a counter position to the argument? Otherwise next time just type “u r dumb” and save yourself a couple of characters in typing.
Ban videogames too. And walking around with hockey sticks.
What a absurdly basic argument. And you thought it was poignant?
Btw, yes, public intoxication is against the law in many places in the world. Pretty standard rule.
My neighbours also are not particularly relevant to form a good argument. If my neighbours are all staunch believers in some deity, doesn't mean it's a good argument to believe in one.
> Btw, yes, public intoxication is against the law in many places in the world. Pretty standard rule.
So is homosexuality. Doesn't mean it's a positive thing or that it solves the problem it's supposed to solve for society. Unless you just want the "ugly people out of your way", in which case killing them could also work, but you probably would have some argument against that, but prison seems fine, right?
I can see the sad-faces all around, as journo's at the Oligarch's Daily Tribue lament that human rights are completely out of control now that cops can't roust people and smack them around for the crime of making their own personal choices, harming nobody.
"B..b..but what about property values?!"
You mean that thing around which the entire economies of the western world revolve around?
I don't know if you are mocking people who speak like this and satirising their beliefs that drugs are harmless, or if you genuinely speak like this and are mocking the people who wish to criminalize drugs.
Anyway, it's just more evidence for my campaign to criminalize sarcasm and get its users rousted and smacked by police.
They can be give a variety of punishments, like fine, ban from an area, associating with certain people, suspension of government support.
If you want undesirables to go away, you have to give them somewhere to go. A better life or at least a safe place. Moving them on solves nothing.
As another comment reiterates, Portugal had a good start but then gutted the social support funding. A huge part of that has to be giving people a way out, so that drug taking isn't the default for the down and out. Decriminalisation is a good first step but not on its own.
Quote from article: “João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.”
“After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.”
More recomforting is to read Portugal is re-investing in the original effort meausures:
“The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.”
Let’s hope things improve.
In Portugal drug possession, use are illegal. They aren't criminal but are illegal and carry penalties at special drug courts which give less protect to defendents.
Also, Vancouver's downtown core hardly had any families and things families need simply aren't available downtown.
They shouldn't be all that different. Vancouver (well, British Columbia) has tried to model its decriminalization efforts after Portugal's.
That decriminalization hasn't even been around for more than a handful of months, though, so it seems rather early for Vancouver to also be having doubts. Nobody was expecting things to change overnight; Health Canada allowed until 2026 to prove the model.
In Portugal drug possession, use are not criminal but they are illegal and carry penalties.
In BC possession for personal use is legal. There are no penalties.
That is not the same.
> state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.
When it should be that addictive use should be seen as a health problem, to be taken care of with treatment, instead of either a "human right" OR something to be treated by intentionally inflicting MASSIVE suffering (jail + esp. the post-jail 'collateral penalties').
Is it like a virus, some are immune? Does the data for alcohol-addicts look like data for epidemics?
Maybe the transformation happens due to some other reason?
Alcohol: absolutely? How many parents beat their children/spouses under the influence of alcohol, but never sober? How many kill others under the influence while driving?
I'm not saying it's great, I'm saying that it's legal, and it should be, and other drugs also should be, and enforcement of responsible use should be a priority.
Why would you even think alcohol has no negative effects on society?
And as studies came to light, as the scientific consensus slowly but surely arrives at the "most likely no safe amount" conclusion, it gets less and less glamorized in TV shows, and young people are already drinking less (probably because they're on tiktok and screens instead). Despite all the advertisement for alcohol.
In may countries you get thrown in the slammer for drinking or being a drunk nuisance in public. Even if you're just outside the pub where you legally consumed alcohol.
So the obvious conclusion in the eyes of the amazon times? Instead of helping people in crisis, we need state troops to threaten, intimidate, and attack them. You know, like the good old days, when drug policy was much worse.
The bezos chronicle strikes again!
Reading through this thread, it's stunning how shallow the discussion is about addiction and drug use. People suggesting that tent cities are the result of drug use, rather than part of the cause (and no, that's not to say people without a good home become drug addicts, that thinking is on the same level, the problem is deeper).
The economy is failing, we've past peak everything, inequality is terrible, there are more candidates for doing drugs overall, so there are more drug users. As things get worse and worse, which they will, there will be even more addicts, because life has literally nothing else to offer them to make them feel good.
For all we know, this regulation in Portugal could be doing even better than it was, say, 8 years ago, it's just that society has gotten worse at supporting its population and as a result there are so many more potential drug users. Most people aren't required for the economy to function, and it's less and less each year.
People who always said that drugs are bad mmmkay, I think they aren't happy with sensible legislation, because it makes them look stupid, so they are the first to come up with weak strawman arguments as soon as some data point turns in their favour.
Now with that said, crack, meth and heroin are not "social drugs" and are not compatible with a healthy society. They are strongly addictive and cause permanent damage. You might disagree (and that's fine), but I don't see how making those legally available outside of addiction treatment facility will lead to favourable societal outcomes in any meaningful way.
Honestly, I don't think anyone can seriously claim it is anywhere near as bad as alcohol, other than in two regards: smoking isn't great for you (but that's a method problem, not a substance one) and the smell in public (which is a minor issue and, again, one that can be mitigated).
By any other measure - addiction, short-term and long-term harms, indirect harm to third-parties - alcohol is worse.
What makes you think that drug use has anything much to do at all with drug policy? People take drugs because society is shit, not because of the rule of law.
Society also becomes shit because people take drugs.
On a related tangent, Heroin is actually a former trademark. Not a lapsed one, but one that was specifically revoked to punish Bayer during the war. Aspirin was another one. And that's why you see generic "aspirin" but no generic explicitly marketed as "xerox" or "kleenex." The kleenex mark is weakened, but not dead like aspirin and heroin.
As an uncontroversial example, maybe someone is well qualified to manipulate explosives in their garage. But society would still say the risk is not worth it, because by the time the “nuisance” is dealt with, there would be unacceptable losses.
The relevant measures to be discussed are what is the probability of someone using PCP and not being a nuisance, and if they did use PCP, what severity would the nuisance be?
The problem is that taking pcp significantly raises the probability the user will commit an act of violence, by which point it’s too late.
A little thing called democracy. Perhaps you've heard of it.
How?
Well shit, get on it Portugal! /s
In fact, you can subsidize housing costs from all the savings on healthcare costs.
there are solutions that have worked in the past. the problem is the US center-right doesn't like them because they can be abused, and it's far worse for one person in a million to have something given to them that they don't deserve than for a million people to be helped.
What does the US center-right have to do with Portugal?
There are serious problems with welfare programs. They’ve been the downfall of entire countries. Look at Argentina where the bloated government payroll can be viewed as a sort of work for welfare program. The country can’t afford it and its currency blows up on a regular basis as a result.
That’s not saying you should have no welfare programs, but there’s a balance to be maintained. Probably it should be time limited so people are given a sort of “financial rehab”, but not disincentivized to work. And it shouldn’t stop if you get a job, why, just why would you want an incentive against that.
Some people seem to think there can be consumption without production or life without work, but that’s logically incoherent.
Anyone who wants to live in a better society, who realises this policy would help achieve that.
> Why would those people want to work if they can just freeload?
Because most people want more than just the absolute necessities of life.
You'd be surprised.
Or was it that unclear that I was talking about solving poverty, with the idea that all the money that goes for ultra rich could actually be distributed better?
> Solve poverty > How? > Maybe a first step would be to prevent the ultra rich to get even richer.
If you can't understand the similarity between this and "looking at the ultra rich to help solve poverty", honestly I don't know what I can do.
Then if you want to solve inequalities, do you think it's easier to start by solving inequalities between the poor people, or is it easier to start by taking money from those who are insanely rich for no good reason?
Step 2) ????
Step 3) Equality!
That escalated quickly. I would be tempted to say that you completely, absolutely hallucinated the meaning of my words, but then... well English isn't my first language, so maybe that's on me.
Are you assuming we already have enough resources to solve poverty? Isn't the actual issue that even with perfectly equal distribution we don't have enough resources for every body?
If the pie isn't big enough, why is the communist's focus always on how to divide the pie, rather than growing the pie? Do communists have anything to add at all when it comes to increasing productivity so we can all have more?
Wasn't lack of productivity exactly what killed communism? Even China didn't wake up until it opened its markets.
Inequality isn't increasing because poor people are doing worse. Poor people are doing better. Poor people's conditions are improving faster than they ever have. It's true that the richest people's wealth grew even faster than that, therefore increasing inequality.
But if you really care about the wellbeing of the poor, then you wouldn't distracted by inequality when the conditions are improving. You'd interrupt the most successful ever for the worst system ever, driven by jealousy, bitterness, and moral indignation.
There are many systems that would probably be considered communist in the US (at least by those of you who seem to have no clue about anything that is not libertarian) that work really well without genocides. But you'd have to open a book that is not US-centered to see that.
I still object to communism, and populist memes like "eat the rich." At best they're immature, at worst they're agents of chaos and destruction who actually harm the lives of millions when they get what they want.
Really? 30 million deaths wouldn't give you pause? Therac-25 killed or injured 6 people and we still talk about that.
Communism doesn't deserve another chance.
The point of the parent is that the fact that USSR collapsed does not mean communism (or any kind of less liberal system, for that matter) is fundamentally bad. Just like getting a crash does not mean that the language is fundamentally bad.
What about this one, following your reasoning: "The Nazi were producing cars, and the Nazi brought us into a world war. Therefore no one should ever produce cars again".
What you are demonstrating is that it is impossible to talk with you. Not sure if that is because you can't understand a basic sentence or just because you aren't open to even learn what a word means before making completely wrong conclusions, but I don't care. We won't have a constructive discussion, let's stop here.
So to within a rounding error, no, it's a poor country full of poor people with an irrelevant number of billionaires. You could destroy all foreign investment and future growth by confiscating literally all of their wealth for 1 year of modestly higher government spending.
[1] https://profilbaru.com/article/List_of_Portuguese_by_net_wor..., ignoring people who nominal "citizens" but live and hold money elsewhere.
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/275337/government-revenu....
All of this is to say that if we were to somehow “solve poverty” (even putting aside the vast oversimplification made by such a statement), while it might reduce rates of drug addiction, it by no means would be an overall solution to the problem. Addiction respects no socioeconomic boundaries.
You jumped through a lot of hoops to explain that there is an avenue from middle class to poverty through drugs, but any avenue from drug use to poverty pales in comparison to the avenues from poverty to drug addiction. People who have no place in society, because they have nothing worth contributing, or for whatever other reason they end up in poverty, they find good feelings and usefulness in drugs, in the participation with others in a similar position.
The link between poverty and drug use is very very clear.
The country has been suffering from wage stagnation, unemployment and an aging population and that's definitely reflected in stats.
There are probably strong socioevolutionary reasons why this is the case.
On the other hand, cannabis has a long tradition of use in ancient India[1].
I do believe such bans to be hideous and downright stupid. It is crass authoritarianism, nothing less than the subordination of the individual's body and mind to a tyrannical society clownish enough to demand it.
It seems like many drugs are banned in various societies today, so I don't quite follow you.
OP thinks no "advanced civilization" has ever allowed drugs. Drugs bans enforced by state power only became a thing near the end of the 19th century. That means no advanced civilization existed before then - not the Romans, nor Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Indians, or Chinese - and countless others. Sounds incorrect to me.
So, again, what do you consider advanced? If we go back to the foundations of Western civilization, we find the Greeks quite enjoyed getting high on many interesting substances. The Romans and Egyptians as well.
What about native populations on the US continent? The Peyote tribe literally have a mescaline-bearing cactus named after them, along with all the various substances known to the South Americans before the Spaniards decided to put the torch to their accumulated cultural practices. (c.f. The Florentine Codex)
The histories of China and India are also rife with periods of legalized substance use, some good and some bad.
But to your question: yes, there have been many advanced civilizations whom have been "gung-ho" about legalized drugs.
Most of the drugs that are a problem for us are late 19th century or 20th century inventions. Sure, there are some others here and there... in their most diluted, least problematic forms. But that's about it.
A better question than yours would be "when has criminalizing drugs ever done any of the things we might hope it would do?"... but it's a difficult question that most people want to avoid. That they're willing to accept dishonest, fallacious answers for.
As their society aligned with the rest of Western Europe in the last 20 years drugs use came back up, no surprise there. Also cutting the funding during the financial crisis did not help, I believe that.
Now believing that you could replicate what was done in the Portugal of 20 years ago in LA or any place where society have long disintegrate is ludacris. No matter how much money you put in it.
It is a conspiracy theory to believe that drug criminalization has a strictly for-profit motive despite near universal adoption as a policy. That is to say, you believe a conspiracy theory casually.
So, execution for drug use in Malaysia has a root cause of racism.
This just goes to show you that these people have absolutely no intellectual rigor applied to any of their ideas.
Their fake ideology is built strictly on a convoluted set of shibboleths that apply only loosely as semi-believable just so stories in a Western (specifically American) context.
This article is a good introduction to the history of US drug enforcement: https://timeline.com/harry-anslinger-racist-war-on-drugs-pri...
Racism theory is a Rorschach test.
Suffice it to say, it's really tough to interrogate reality when you have nothing but contrapositive indications and your response is "yes, this only applies to this one instance though".
This is why studying things systemically rather than through a collection of historical anecdotes you've picked up is a vastly superior system for modelling reality. This argumentum ad collection of ad hoc historical anecdotes that reify my pseudoscientific ideas is less interesting intellectually than Horoscopes.
We don't need to discuss this further as it is highly incendiary and you're not allowed to have arguments about topics that make people upset, so any polemicist is basically unchecked.
Not very intellectually curious. Where's my friend?
"racism is one of the many motives for drug criminalization" is thoroughly documented and not debatable by serious people.
If low drug prices is what you want, we should legalize the production and sales of drugs, but keep usage illegal.
I think this is an interesting thought. As a recreational drug user myself (I drink alcohol sometimes), I do indeed feel like drugs should be legalized, so as to enable regulation. But I don't feel like me dealing with the subject in my day to day life should have a bearing on whether I'm able to have an informed opinion on the matter. It's like saying rape victims are too close to rape and therefore their opinions on rape legislation are skewed.
No...no.
Drug users are not the victims
Obviously, in the application of a logical argument, you need to respond to logic with logic.
That being said, it's also obvious that a criminal isn't really a good authority on the justness of the crime they commit -- we implicitly understand that this is part of the rationalization process for antisocial behaviors.
Also, yeah, the rape "analogy" was both socially awkward and horrible, a double whammy. Generally, rape isn't a great topic for conversation.
How is that obvious? It's not at all obvious to me that, for example, MLK Jr was not an authority on the justice of civil disobedience because he himself practiced civil disobedience.
If we disregard the opinions of people who think doing X is justified and therefore proceed to do X, then we bias ourselves toward the opinions of people who oppose X, as they will be overrepresented in the sample of people who choose not to do X.
Such cherry picking is not a logically sound method for developing an honest, unbiased worldview.
Not interested in making comparisons to someone that you can't separate from a type of neo-sainthood.
Anyhow, having an unpopular opinion isn't antisocial or illegal.
Buying heroin is.
If you can keep your life balanced while on drugs, good for you. But you're still toying with the risk of you getting addicted and losing control; to even take that risk is selfish.
But let me try again without making an analogy:
Some percentage of people do X and therefore try to justify doing X.
But another percentage of people think X is justified and therefore do X.
You do not appear to make a distinction between these two cases. You lump the latter in with the former and then dismiss their views out of hand.
This is such bad logic that I am beginning to suspect that you are are actually being a hypocrite here: that you dislike drug users emotionally, and so you are trying extra hard to justify that dislike intellectually, even when it requires blatantly fallacious reasoning. (And, dammit, here I ended up making another analogy, albeit hopefully subtly enough that you don't accuse me of comparing you to a criminal.)
An estimated 1 in every 16 men, and some non-zero percentage of women, seem to be pretty cool with it (at least as perpetrators).
I don't really understand how anybody sensible can read a sentence like that and think to themselves, "yes, this is fine."
If individual bodily autonomy is the god you have chosen to worship above all other paths painstakingly eked out over the ages through much trial and error toward human flourishing, I guess it makes sense, but for those of us who ascribe to more, dare I say, traditional ideas about what constitutes good human life, the thinking that underlies the kinds of policies which lead to the outcomes detailed in this article seem utterly abhorrent.
It's astonishing how much human misery and suffering some people are willing to put up with and justify when wearing ideological blinders.
It's not like we'd be doing him a service by charging him with a felony.