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Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts

washingtonpost.com

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

#211

Post by otherme123 »

deanCommie wrote: post #183

> 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, though still below European averages. > 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?

I guess it's a state of mind of "doing something". If you do what Portugal is doing and your numbers are the same than others, it feels natural to think that if you do something things will improve.

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.

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

#212

Post by 99_00 »

phas0ruk wrote: post #194

This reminds me of Vancouver Canada. What happens is decent people and families move out of the downtown core, leaving the worst offenders to run amok. It’s sad. I wonder how many of the 200 experts advocating for the continuation of this policy have children.

It shouldn't. Vancouver and Portugal have very different policy.

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.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

SllX wrote: post #86
asymmetric wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delegating to nonprofits is not the same as privatizing. Your argument creates a false dichotomy in which the only two possible actors are the state or private enterprises, but that’s not the case, even for the simple reasons that nonprofits are not the same as for-profit entities. Common Pool Resources are a prime example of a paradigm that escapes this dichotomy.

I don’t know how Portuguese law works but in the United States non-profits have private owners and are private corporations. The contrast they have is with “for-profit” corporations, not “private” corporations. Given the primary purpose of being designated a “non-profit” is a tax advantage for the corporation, I’m willing to bet Portuguese corporations likely don’t differ in this manner. Privatize is an acceptable ve…

[deleted]

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

#215

Post by 99_00 »

personjerry wrote: post #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 cou…

Portegues have lots of tools. They are sent to drug court which doesn't give the same protections to defendents as criminal courts.

They can be give a variety of punishments, like fine, ban from an area, associating with certain people, suspension of government support.

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

#216

Post by djaychela »

thucydides wrote: post #61

n=1: during my visit to lisbon in 2021, i was accosted twice by burly guys near my hotel[1] who aggressively asked if i wanted to buy weed or cocaine. the first time, the guy was so angry at my refusal ("no thanks, man") that he followed me up a public staircase to continue his pitch. he backed off when i returned his verbal aggression. so maybe the portuguese policy could use some tweaking. [1] https://goo.gl/maps/y…

I recently went to Porto for a weekend. I've never been offered drugs as many times as I have there... but no-one was pushy, it was literally that you walked past them, they said "coke, hash" or similar, and that was that. They were maybe more overt during the night (and where the bars were), but never anything more than that, and not a problem for me - I've had more pushy encounters in London in the mid 90s.

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

#217

Post by 99_00 »

standardUser wrote: post #75
personjerry wrote: post #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 cou…

I don't get it. Someone smoking something doesn't bother me, unless maybe if I can smell it, then it bothers me very, very slightly. The same way someone drinking a beer in public doesn't bother me. How could it? 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…

The world is full of things that can't be eliminated, but we benefit greatly from reducing their occurrence.

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

#218

Post by fwlr »

Punishing people for being addicted to drugs is miserable, and having people be addicted to drugs is also miserable. When drugs were criminalized, the state had to dole out a lot of misery in punishments, but this also depressed the addiction/usage rate, which consequently lowered the drug addiction misery by some amount as well (not necessarily by more than the extra misery that punishment brought, but not necessarily less either).

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.

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

#219

Post by heisenbit »

pineaux wrote: post #57
bykhun wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's a "learn by example". If anything, it makes me doesn't want to try heroine It's like if we presented corpses of dead drivers on the main streets – I bet it'd greatly lower overspeeding and drunk driving

This is probably not true.for example: People know smoking kills. The tabacco industry even popularized stories about sad COPD patients that were dying in the hospital and still wouldnt quit smoking. "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…

Tobacco use - despite its visibility and despite being extremely addictive - went down a lot. Legal and normal are NOT the same thing. The biggest problems arise when normal is illegal as it undermines the law and maintains delusions about what is going on in reality.

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

#220

Post by ETH_start »

SllX wrote: post #86
asymmetric wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delegating to nonprofits is not the same as privatizing. Your argument creates a false dichotomy in which the only two possible actors are the state or private enterprises, but that’s not the case, even for the simple reasons that nonprofits are not the same as for-profit entities. Common Pool Resources are a prime example of a paradigm that escapes this dichotomy.

I don’t know how Portuguese law works but in the United States non-profits have private owners and are private corporations. The contrast they have is with “for-profit” corporations, not “private” corporations. Given the primary purpose of being designated a “non-profit” is a tax advantage for the corporation, I’m willing to bet Portuguese corporations likely don’t differ in this manner. Privatize is an acceptable ve…

>Privatize is an acceptable verbiage for a government or government-owned entity which has outsourced to a private corporation.

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.

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