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Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

washingtonpost.com

11–20 of 660 posts

Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

#12
> Porto’s police have increased patrols to drug-plagued neighborhoods. But given existing laws, there’s only so much they can do. On a recent afternoon, an emaciated man in striped pants sleeping in front of a state-funded drug-use center awoke to a patrol of four officers. He sat up, then defiantly began assembling his crack pipe. Officers walked on, shaking their heads.

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?

Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

#13

Talk about burying the lede, 11 years ago they privatized their drug oversight operation and cut funding by over 80%. Gee, I wonder if that could have an impact? > 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 th…

Wish I could have upvoted this comment a couple of more times.

Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

#14

Loads of proposals, all missing the obvious: solve poverty. Portugal and south Europe in general suffer greatly from it. Stats make the region look good on paper but reality is very different.

> solve poverty How?

First, solve housing.

Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

#15

Drugs should be sold at the grocery store, no question asked. They should be cheap too. That would solve the drug problem.

Have you seen how much San Francisco and Seattle have improved with drug tolerant policies?

Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

#16

Drugs should be sold at the grocery store, no question asked. They should be cheap too. That would solve the drug problem.

It always trips me out reading early 20th century novels where the protagonist will stop in a drug store, buy a pint of whiskey, some cocaine or other now schedule 1 drug, and then sit down at the soda fountain counter and have lunch. Talk about one stop shopping.

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.

Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

#18
post #4

I love it, the entire argument of this article boils down to, "A problem with visibility" rather than any failure of the policy. As though an existing problem being visible isn't societal pressure to better address the problem. Oh they also present statistics contained to the 2019-2023 period as though that wasn't pandemic-driven.

The issue is that making a behavior more visible tends to normalize it.

Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

#19

Drugs should be sold at the grocery store, no question asked. They should be cheap too. That would solve the drug problem.

Either you're just trolling or you haven't spent enough time on the internet to realise that it's impossible for us to tell if you're trolling or sincere.

Re: Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

#20
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> solve poverty How?

First, solve housing.

So to solve one incredibly hard problem humanity has never solved... you need to first solve another incredibly hard problem?

Well shit, get on it Portugal! /s

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