Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 545 posts

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#101

Post by Chathamization »

BatFastard wrote: post #58
thrden wrote: post #23

One thing that people aren't considering is that we have legalization experiments within the United States, and we have seen an uptick in marijuana usage[1]. This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana. I think that given our culture (one that I believe is potentially universal, but I can not speak to universality) has a tendency toward over consumption, its not clear to me that legalization of…

One things Marijuana legalization has done is decrease opioid usage in states that have legalized it. It has also reduced drunk driving rates. Of course taxes are nice, and removing the money from the underworld is a big win too.

This is an important point; making a drug illegal can sometimes lead to people seeking out more dangerous drugs that are legal to use instead. Bath salts (the drugs, not actual bath salts) are a good example - a large part of their popularity they weren't illegal at the federal level until 2012.

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#102

Post by stretchwithme »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #85
r00fus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm - do you have a cite on your claims about the UK? It's hardly fair to ask for citations when you give none.

Strictly speaking, Mexico has the lowest cancer rate (not death rate) of the OECD, so the USA should emulate them for healthcare. On the flip side, Denmark has the highest cancer rate, so they must be doing something wrong. The alternative explanation is that people in Mexico generally die before they can get cancer.

Or could be cancer is not detected as well in Mexico before death or in autopsies. And perhaps Denmark is much better at that.

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#103

Post by adventured »

r00fus wrote: post #79
briandear wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any citation on fewer handguns, fewer deaths? Violent crime actually increased in the UK after they banned guns despite near simultaneous expansion of police funding. These issues aren’t as simple as you might imply. The demographics of Sweden are different than those of Chicago or Matamoros. Conroe, Texas has very high gun ownership and very low violent crime. New York has very low gun ownership and relatively low v…

Hmm - do you have a cite on your claims about the UK? It's hardly fair to ask for citations when you give none.

edit: I'd like to see the people downvoting my facts, counter how this doesn't amount to a wave or big surge of crime, these numbers are huge increases in a short amount of time.

---

Crime has seen a huge increase in Britain and it appears set to keep getting worse. Crime in London has increased dramatically. I'm not going to claim that's due to gun laws, however it is factually correct that crime is surging big time.

Acid attacks alone have skyrocketed in the last three years in London, tripling in that time to around 500 annually.

Jul 2017

"Police record 10% rise in crime in England and Wales, with 18% increase in violent crime and significant rise in murder rate"

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/20/official-fig...

April 2017

"Gun crime offences in London surged by 42% in the last year, according to official statistics. The Met Police's figures showed there were 2,544 gun crime offences from April 2016 to April 2017 compared to 1,793 offences from 2015 until 2016."

"Knife crime also increased by 24% with 12,074 recorded offences from 2016 to 2017."

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-39578500

Oct 2017

"Violent crime soars by fifth as total offences recorded by police push past five million. ... The data, published by the Office for National Statistics, showed the number of violence against the person crimes logged by police went up by a fifth (19 per cent) to 1.2 million."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/20/london-now-danger...

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#104

Post by stretchwithme »

thisisit wrote: post #2

This is great. But I sometimes wonder if the people who advocate for "x worked for y, so it is best practice and every should do it" appreciate situation complexities and cultural differences?

Which is why I'd prefer it if such decisions can be made very locally. It's easier to see the effect of a change if five counties in New Jersey make it and infant mortality soars compared to the rest of the state than if the entire country makes the change at once.

And those counties can also revert to the old policy in less time than it takes to convince an entire country to repeal bad policy.

We've made big changes in the past that turned out to be the wrong thing and it takes many years to correct. Prohibition, for example.

Or deciding the entire country is going to allow leaded gasoline, instead of allowing cities like Philadelphia to ban it. It took another SEVENTY TWO YEARS to finally get it banned.

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#106

Post by angry_octet »

berbec wrote: post #51
yosito wrote: post #5

Because drug policy is about associating your political opponents with criminal activity and has nothing to do with preventing drug abuse or addiction.

I do believe you've hit the nail on the head there. It seems one of the big initial reasons for calling cannibis marijuana and criminalization was part of racist legislation against Hispanics. 'Numerous accounts say that "marijuana" came into popular usage in the U.S. in the early 20th century because anti-cannabis factions wanted to underscore the drug's "Mexican-ness."' [1] 1: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitc…

Exactly. Its dog whistle politics, portraying Hispanic and African American people as the major source of drug crime.

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#107

Post by irritant »

WalterBright wrote: post #91

It's the sunk cost fallacy. When you've invested enormous amounts of treasure, careers, political capital, conventional wisdom, etc., in having a position, it is very, very hard to say "oops, that's all a big mistake, my bad!" It's much easier to double down on it.

aka the yahoo effect

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#108

Post by endymi0n »

adventured wrote: post #97
toomanybeersies wrote: post #50

This scenario doesn't just happen with drug policy, but with practically any divisive policy discussion. People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere. Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Every time a country goes through the process of debating whether to legalise gay marriage, there's a bunch of p…

> Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Unfortunately that's an exaggerated claim. The world is still extraordinarily backwards when it comes to gay marriage. 70% of European nations for example don't allow gay marriage. About 90% of the world's population live in a nation where gay marriage is not yet legalized. Only a little over two dozen nations allo…

To be fair, the 70% number is true but misleading due to a lot of the new smaller members in the East.

More than 80% of EU population is living in a country where either gay marriage or civil unions (which are pretty close) are legal.

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#109

Post by zaarn »

r00fus wrote: post #79
briandear wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any citation on fewer handguns, fewer deaths? Violent crime actually increased in the UK after they banned guns despite near simultaneous expansion of police funding. These issues aren’t as simple as you might imply. The demographics of Sweden are different than those of Chicago or Matamoros. Conroe, Texas has very high gun ownership and very low violent crime. New York has very low gun ownership and relatively low v…

Hmm - do you have a cite on your claims about the UK? It's hardly fair to ask for citations when you give none.

I would naively assume that better healthcare means that people live longer and thusly the exposure to cancer risk runs for longer.

Effect: More people get cancer

Re: Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

#110

Post by adventured »

endymi0n wrote: post #108
adventured wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Unfortunately that's an exaggerated claim. The world is still extraordinarily backwards when it comes to gay marriage. 70% of European nations for example don't allow gay marriage. About 90% of the world's population live in a nation where gay marriage is not yet legalized. Only a little over two dozen nations allo…

To be fair, the 70% number is true but misleading due to a lot of the new smaller members in the East. More than 80% of EU population is living in a country where either gay marriage or civil unions (which are pretty close) are legal.

edit: the downvotes would be amusing if it weren't because I'm bringing up how regressive most European nations are about gay marriage. I understand it's an inconvenient fact and upsetting to some, I'll go ahead and retain my position however: 70% of European nations not allowing gay marriage, is a travesty.

Consider for a moment, that in the responses below, people are actually defending and rationalizing that 70% of European nations haven't legalized gay marriage. Let that sink in for a moment. Now imagine if ~35 states in the US didn't have gay marriage, and someone tried to rationalize that away (oh they're just small states; oh those are newer states), what would the response be? Yeah.

---

> To be fair, the 70% number is true but misleading due to a lot of the new smaller members in the East.

It's not misleading in the least. It's an annoying fact to europhiles perhaps.

New smaller members in the East... what are you talking about? New members of what? Those are European nations, it's entirely fair to count them as European nations.

Civil unions are not gay marriage. If all the US had done is to implement civil unions, it would be roundly and properly mocked for doing so.

Post reply on HN