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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

#361

Post by Retric »

boredumb wrote: post #354

Anyone who thinks funding rehab centers and getting homeless drug addicts into free apartment units are people who have never been around homeless drug addicts. There may be some wonderful examples of this working but 99.8% of the people you will encounter on your commute are not about to participate in rehab, and if you ask them they will give you a history of apartments and homes they've been asked to leave due to…

The homeless drug addicts covers a huge range of people. Many actually claw their way back into normal society. No solution is going to fix everyone but you can minimize the externalities from homelessness.

It’s simply an optimization problem. Prison is horrendously expensive, and people on the street have real externalities for everyone in the area.

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

#362

Post by orangepurple »

thriftwy wrote: post #358
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tent cities don't exist solely in places without access to housing "Access to housing" isn't enough. You might have "access" to health care but unable to afford it. You need housing as a right - even without payment - alongside enough adequate housing for everyone. And allow folks to do things in their own home. If they cannot do it at their home with other people, the person in question does not have adequate housin…

A billion people across the world may want a house "as right" in San Francisco. It may only fit three order of magnitudes people realistically, though.

[flagged]

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

#363

Post by cies »

danielbln wrote: post #340
rr808 wrote: post #332

> Amsterdam — a city long famous for its pot cafes — last month instituted a new ban on smoking marijuana in public places. I'd love this for NYC. I'm getting pretty sick of smelling weed all day on the streets.

Noone should be smoking anything in public places, weed or not.

Agreed, if banning one type of smoking, it'd be more straight to just ban them all. Or it becomes "taste policing": I/we/they don't like the smell of weed.

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

#364

Post by HWR_14 »

comfortabledoug wrote: post #266
virgildotcodes wrote: post #7

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…

What about the other quotes from the article that have nothing to do with funding... > “When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,” said Keith Humphreys, former senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Then word gets out that there’s an open…

> Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab.

This is entirely driven by funding. The article explained its a multi year wait for treatment (funding issue) and so the police aren't making people appear before the commissions because all they can do is release them.

Meanwhile, the article says when it was funded 20 years ago, it effectively reduced the amount of heroin used.

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

#365

Post by thriftwy »

orangepurple wrote: post #362
thriftwy wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A billion people across the world may want a house "as right" in San Francisco. It may only fit three order of magnitudes people realistically, though.

[flagged]

Their numbers may be much greater if housing were guaranteed.

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

#366

Post by blowski »

Retric wrote: post #361
boredumb wrote: post #354

Anyone who thinks funding rehab centers and getting homeless drug addicts into free apartment units are people who have never been around homeless drug addicts. There may be some wonderful examples of this working but 99.8% of the people you will encounter on your commute are not about to participate in rehab, and if you ask them they will give you a history of apartments and homes they've been asked to leave due to…

The homeless drug addicts covers a huge range of people. Many actually claw their way back into normal society. No solution is going to fix everyone but you can minimize the externalities from homelessness. It’s simply an optimization problem. Prison is horrendously expensive, and people on the street have real externalities for everyone in the area.

I was with you until “simply”. Nothing about this problem is simple.

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

#367

Post by peoplefromibiza »

criley2 wrote: post #333
jhoechtl wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is a death sentence. sounds very plausible, where is the fallacy?

It's easy to find fallacies if you think about it. For example I could say the opposite > giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is the key that unlocks recovery I've constructed my argument identically and provided the same amount of evidence for my position. When you compare both positions side by side, I think you can easily see that neither is valuable. They are both opinions being presented as facts (begging the q…

> giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is the key that unlocks recovery

except that when we talk about privacy for addicts, we are actually talking about extreme loneliness.

which is the fastest route towards OD.

evidence show that

adults with mental health issues are more than twice as likely to experience loneliness as those with strong mental health [1]

Loneliness can increase the risk of early mortality by 26% [2]

editor's note: loneliness alone, imagine loneliness + mental health issues + severe drug addiction.

addicts don't need privacy, on the contrary, they need sociality. 4 walls shared with other people could provide that, 4 walls alone won't and will probably make things worse.

[1] https://newsroom.thecignagroup.com/loneliness-epidemic-persi...

[2] Holt-Lunstad et al., ‘Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review’, Perspectives on psychological science 10.2 (2015), pp. 227-237.

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

#368

Post by palata »

seventhtiger wrote: post #321
palata wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes, literally, like this: > Solve poverty > How? > Maybe a first step would be to prevent the ultra rich to get even richer. If you can't understand the similarity between this and "looking at the ultra rich to help solve poverty", honestly I don't know what I can do.

You can do us a favor and outline for us how doing that is a first step to solving poverty. Otherwise it seems like you just regurgitated a populist meme.

Ok, let's say you find a way to distribute the resources evenly between everybody. Haven't you solved poverty then?

Then if you want to solve inequalities, do you think it's easier to start by solving inequalities between the poor people, or is it easier to start by taking money from those who are insanely rich for no good reason?

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

#369

Post by lakomen »

Generalization of the term drugs is what is wrong. This kind of post is in the same mind as the outdated anti drugs CIA drug money articles of the past. The CIA needs a source of money so they made sure ignorant articles like those get published. Cannabis != Cocaine != Heroine != Ketamine != you name it

Some "meds" are more dangerous and addictive than some "drugs".

So what, tourists now dictate what's good or bad in a country, not the native population?

Get outta here Washington Post

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

#370

Post by Retric »

shuckles wrote: post #336
Etheryte wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many things sound plausible without having any real connection to reality, we shouldn't rely on trust-me-bro when we're talking about people's lives.

In San Francisco, where I am most familiar, SROs which are used to house homeless junkies are the primary location of overdose deaths, even though they house fewer junkies than the streets surrounding them.

Different populations, you really need to randomly assign people to each group to discover if it’s harmful or a side effect of the selection criteria.

I would expect people in SF SROs to OD more for multiple reasons, but I haven’t seen any research on the specifics.

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