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

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

#341

Post by barry-cotter » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:00 PM UTC

toomanybeersies wrote: post #49

andrewstuart wrote: post #41

Portugal’s policy is deeply flawed because it does not legalize the sale of all drugs, only the consumption. When selling is legal is when organized crime leaves the picture, taxes can be collected, product is clean and measured and of quality. Both sides of the equation are important to legalize, doing one without the other means huge problems remain.

I don't think that something as harmful as heroin should be legal to sell, even in a taxed and regulated scenario. Other options that, in my amateur opinion, would be better, would be to more heavily penalise adultered drugs, or to have pharmacies supply, with a prescription, addictive drugs, but only to addicts. The latter idea is basically an extension of safe injection clinics.

Alcohol abuse is more harmful than crack or heroin abuse, according to a new study by a former British government drug advisor and other experts.

Neuropharmacologist David Nutt, MD, of Imperial College London, and colleagues rated 20 different drugs on a scale that takes into account the various harms caused by a drug. Drugs are rated on nine harms a drug causes an individual and seven harms a drug causes society.

The scale, developed by a panel of experts called the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ICSD), ranges from 0 (no harm) to 100 (greatest possible harm). It is weighted so that a drug that scores 50 is half as harmful as a drug that scores 100.

"The highest and lowest overall harm scores … are 72 for alcohol and 5 for mushrooms," Nutt and colleagues calculate. "The ICSD scores lend support to the widely accepted view that alcohol is an extremely harmful drug both to users and to society

https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/news/20101101/...

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

#342

Post by pault » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:00 PM UTC

nkurz wrote: post #66

wdewind wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot here that needs to be picked apart. Here are the major things you're missing: 1. Marijuana has been researched extensively and its health effects are at worst similar to alcohol, at best significantly less bad for you. In that context it makes sense to think of marijuana as a consumer product, and it makes sense that requiring a consumer product be sold in a dangerous and unregulated way would reduce de…

I rarely downvote clear and well-written comments just because I disagree with them, but feel I need to make an exception here. Your "1" is true, but you prefaced it by claiming that it was one of the "major things" the parent was missing. I'm pretty sure he wasn't missing this, as indicated by the sentence "This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana". Number "2" adds useful distinctions regard…

In my experience people get addicted to drugs because they have underlying chronic depression and/or severe ADD, Bipolar disorder, BPD, etc. If you treat the disorder the drug use slows dramatically. Also, lack of social support structures and economic opportunity. All of these things are huge unaddressed problems in the US and increasingly so, and the opioid epidemic is a symptom of this in my opinion.

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

#343

Post by foxhound6 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:00 PM UTC

wereHamster wrote: post #311

dalbasal wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't live in the US, but I'm skeptical. There are a lot of places where civilian gun ownership causes problems, gun crime, etc. Some of the places where it does not cause big problems (eg Switzerland) have liberal gun laws and high ownership rates. There are examples where widespread gun ownership/availability causes exactly the kinds of is "problems" that (according to some) the American founders intended it to c…

> Some of the places where it does not cause big problems (eg Switzerland) have liberal gun laws and high ownership rates. So you don't consider suicides to be a 'big problem', eh? https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/switzerland-s-troubling-record-...

Seems that Australia has a higher suicide rate than Switzerland. Didn't Australia ban guns?

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/who-findings_switzerland-report...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/09/27/australias-suici...

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

#344

Post by ceejayoz » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:01 PM UTC

gozur88 wrote: post #258

alkonaut wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. And people advocating stricter gun laws can't afford NOT be open about this. "We don't want to take your guns, we want to change attitudes so your grandchildren won't wan't to own guns, and most importantly won't feel the need to own guns". That said - gun show loophole is just that - a loophole. Should be fixed. I think those who want to keep responsible gun ownership also need to realize they have a lot to…

>That said - gun show loophole is just that - a loophole. Should be fixed. The "gun show loophole" is a misnomer. It's not a loophole. It's simply the case in most states in the US for private sales you're allowed to sell your gun to another person without checking with the federal government first, something that's not true of dealers.

"It's not a loophole. It's simply [describes something that anyone can see is a loophole]."

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

#345

Post by meri_dian » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:06 PM UTC

drewmol wrote: post #53

meri_dian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That thought doesn't really capture the reason. It applies in some circumstances but not this one. In a republic, people are only paid to enforce restrictive drug policy because the people want them to. Most people look at the issue in simple terms. "Drugs are bad, so keep them away from people". Legalization is a counterintuitive way to lower incidence of use and addiction, it will take a lot to convince people it i…

>puts the cart before the horse. to put the cart before the horse is an analogy for doing things in the wrong order.

Which is why I used it

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

#346

Post by galobtter » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:06 PM UTC

lanevorockz wrote: post #233

The reason why it works in Portugal is because the country is in a rolling crisis, they can't afford expensive drugs. Also, with most of the young people leaving they were left with a very Cristian and traditional country. I find it really absurd when newspapers attribute societal changes to single policies. The guard is so intellectually dishonest.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1464837 It's actually not drug use which has decreased all that much - it's actually "drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization."

This obviously has nothing to do with the crisis.

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

#347

Post by hmarques » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:07 PM UTC

It's a shame that people, in 2017, see something that was implemented in 2000 as radical.

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

#348

Post by alkonaut » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:08 PM UTC

andrenth wrote: post #328

alkonaut wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a criminal, by definition, is someone who doesn't care about the law. That was my point too: that it's not really a good argument to argue against laws because they are uneffective against criminals who don't care about them. Laws against child abuse are only effective on people who care about child abuse. Laws against plane hijacking are only effective on people who care about laws on plane hijacking. What's the d…

The correct question following your line of reasoning is not the one about gun ownership, but "Laws against murders are only effective on people who care about laws about murder". However these cases are fundamentally different. Only criminals abuse children, hijack planes or commit murder. Guns, on the other hand, are not only used by criminals. They can be used by citizens for their own protection, to prevent crime…

I wasn't talking about guns in general, I was talking about "illegal guns" (with some definition of illegal). They can be illegal because they are stolen, because they aren't allowed to be owned by people in general (such as an anti aircraft missile) or because the owner doesn't qualify to own it for some other reason - perhaps because of previous convictions in weapons related crimes etc. Let's just say that regardless of the actual legislation, there are always gun laws. Why the gun was illegal was beside the point, the point is that there are guns you don't want people to own, and people who you don't want to have guns (children, whatever) so there are laws agsinst it.

> They can be used by citizens for their own protection, to prevent crimes. > For example, consider a woman preventing a rape attempt by using her gun. Or the recent case of the Texas church, which could have resulted in many more deaths if not by the actions of an armed citizen.

Right. And in countries with fewer guns that citizen wouldn't have been there with his gun - but on the other hand the chance that someone has a semi auto high velocity gun at a church service in the first place is almost zero. There are just 3 societies here: one where everyone has guns, one where only the criminal has a gun, and one where almost no one has a gun. I prefer the last, even if there is a small number of people that have a gun and I don't (I also live in that kind of country so I know it works pretty well). To put this another way: if seeing someone next to me in church had brought a gun would make me feel safer than before because "good they can protect me if a madman starts shooting" then something is already wrong.

One can't argue with that you can stop an individual criminal with a gun. What you can argue about is (for example) whether owning a gun uts you at more risk of being shot than not owning one. Or whether, for society as a whole, guns cause or prevent violence as a net effect. I also think it's problematic to begin by categorizing people into "criminals" and "others" and assuming only people form the criminals group will commit crimes. One has to assume anyone can be a criminal tomorrow.

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

#349

Post by meri_dian » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:09 PM UTC

Analog24 wrote: post #45

meri_dian wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That thought doesn't really capture the reason. It applies in some circumstances but not this one. In a republic, people are only paid to enforce restrictive drug policy because the people want them to. Most people look at the issue in simple terms. "Drugs are bad, so keep them away from people". Legalization is a counterintuitive way to lower incidence of use and addiction, it will take a lot to convince people it i…

Do you have any numbers that prove the general public wants harsh drug laws to be enforced in the US (or anywhere)? As a counter example: the last few major elections for marijuana legalization have all gone overwhelming in support of legalization.

In recent years attitudes towards marijuana have definitely shifted. Attitudes towards MJ have always been closer to acceptance than any other drug. Ask the average person if they think heroin should be sold legally.

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

#350

Post by 627467 » Wed, Dec 06, 2017, 1:10 PM UTC

major505 wrote: post #285

Each country needs to have its own thing. In Brazil for example, a measure like this wold not have any impact because we do not have control over our borders. Take smoking for example. Even if tabacco its alowed, its really expensive to buy legalized cigarrets. So peoplo just smoke cheap ones, that enter from Paraguai border, with no quality control, and brougth in Brazil by organized crime, or even produced in cland…

I suspect the Uruguayan approach would work better in Brasil: state-sanctioned legal production and distribution.

The point is to NOT treat it as a business, but to treat it as a treatment distribution. You still charge patients for the consumption but you have to lower the production and distribution costs to the point of destroying the ilegal production/distribution and the para-national organizations behind it.