171–180 of 660 posts
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Yes. Portugal. 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.
Quote from the article: > 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.
> 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 cou…
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> Someone smoking something doesn't bother me, unless maybe if I can smell it, then it bothers me very, very slightly. 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.
>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 publ…
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.
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Quote from the article: > 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.
Even if respondents were unbiased and truthful. That sounds like a useless metric to me. You need a metric of the harm to society. Drug motivated violent crime for example.
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Even if respondents were unbiased and truthful. That sounds like a useless metric to me. You need a metric of the harm to society. Drug motivated violent crime for example.
Quote from the article: > 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 las…
> 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.
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Yes. Portugal. 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.
Quote from the article: > 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.
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?
Has any advanced civilization been gung-ho about legalized drugs? There are probably strong socioevolutionary reasons why this is the case.
What do you consider advanced? Keeping in mind, of course, that cocaine was legal in the US until ne'er-do-well do-gooders decided they knew better for everyone. That is why we have Coca Cola, which is a formulation of Mr. John Pemberton's Cocaine-Fortified Wine. It's only very recently that we have decided to start imprisoning people for the simple fact of putting things into their bodies. So, again, what do you con…
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…
Indeed. They slashed funding to successful parts of the strategy and now claim the strategy failed. A convenient narrative for politicians, but hardly truth.
They want to follow the "good" example of the US, like most other EU member states are now doing.