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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

#511

Post by mike4ty4 »

K0balt wrote: post #371
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…

Life is misery by default, as a natural consequence of life itself. The never ending tyranny of the need to eat and avoid being eaten is the normal state of affairs. Honestly, if a person isn’t up for it, we need to stop trying to convince them to stay around and be miserable. Elective suicide should be a basic right, and drugs are one way out. We only create misery by “helping” people that don’t want hep. Criminaliz…

If you say they are just self-destroying and "want to create suicide" and "don't want to help those who don't want help" then why not both not help AND not punish at the same time, and just let "nature" do it all? That is, you have elective suicide AND you say they have a free pass out of punishment (basically they can whinny out of public use without ANYTHING adverse), and because "life is misery" just you yourself endure the misery of living in a society where that dealing with the externalities of their highly public drug use as they die/don't "want to climb out" is just a part and parcel of YOUR life. Suffer a little by NOT punishing. You're already doing it, so just do more of it and screw your complaining.

Basically, that is, do everything you say while NOT punishing the public drug use and you just eating the social cost of that as part of life's natural consequences (or else, if you do criminalize it, make a criminal conviction for it both not affect the availability of rehab at all and make the conviction vanish entirely upon successful completion of the rehab and then eat and endure permanently the social consequences of THAT on the "life is misery by default" logic).

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

#512

Post by colonCapitalDee »

DropInIn wrote: post #446
donatj wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're addicted to coffee and alcohol and cigarettes. It's possible that the problem is not the drug itself but the social stigma attached to the drug. I assure you there is a difference between coffee/cigarettes and methamphetamine beyond just stigma. Coffee and tobacco both improve your mental capabilities without short-term downsides. No one’s been fired for showing up with a coffee or tobacco buzz and being mo…

When meth was literally 15$ a gram back in my youth (shipping hub) there was no one robbing anyone for it, as an hour or two at any job would pay for a GRAM (large amount) of Pure meth (and I mean high quality pure without any opacity nor color). Back then most people I knew were using it, in the same way they would use an energy drink, and there were nearly no problems aside from the morons who wouldn't stop parting…

I'm sorry, but what? Meth is not an "energy drink". Meth is a highly addictive substance, both physiologically and psychologically. Its use destroys the human body and mind. Meth is too dangerous to be used casually, in the same way that Russian Roulette is too dangerous to be played at board game night.

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

#513

Post by mike4ty4 »

rscrawfo wrote: post #337
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…

This is a real question, not a retort. But I have known addicts, they don’t exactly take care of their things. It’s very easy to imagine that much of the state supplied housing would quickly become unsafe and or destroyed. How do you handle that?

Spend more of your hard earned cash to do the upkeep. YOU suffer a little more for it and I'm all down for that happening to you because we gotta spread the burden around given it's going to be there, period.

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

#514

Post by mike4ty4 »

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…

This is a big valid point here - absolutely none of us (myself included) have presented any real evidence. So it's all just circlejerking.

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

#515

Post by mike4ty4 »

This seems like a big part of the issue:

> state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.

When it should be that addictive use should be seen as a health problem, to be taken care of with treatment, instead of either a "human right" OR something to be treated by intentionally inflicting MASSIVE suffering (jail + esp. the post-jail 'collateral penalties').

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

#516

Post by mike4ty4 »

donatj wrote: post #384
lukeschlather wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://msdh.ms.gov/page/44,0,382.html Drug overdoses are a nationwide problem in the USA. Mississippi also had a 49% increase in overdoses in 2020. Shelter is a basic human need and depriving people of it on the grounds that they might overdose doesn't seem like it follows. I know plenty of addicts who take care of their things just fine. They're addicted to coffee and alcohol and cigarettes. It's possible that the…

> They're addicted to coffee and alcohol and cigarettes. It's possible that the problem is not the drug itself but the social stigma attached to the drug. I assure you there is a difference between coffee/cigarettes and methamphetamine beyond just stigma. Coffee and tobacco both improve your mental capabilities without short-term downsides. No one’s been fired for showing up with a coffee or tobacco buzz and being mo…

However, even if there is, why does that mean the answer needs to be the _specific_ extraordinarily-severe-by-nature method of criminal punishment? It seems the article, again, was basically suggesting the problem was there is no sort of incentive AT ALL, when it should be that we should be looking for "neither-nor" solutions that are neither the old method nor "just sit back and do nothing".

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

#517

Post by fuzztester »

foogazi wrote: post #103
fuzztester wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the known solution? I don't know much about this area.

If it was you what would you want us to do ? Let you sleep on the streets smoking crack ? treatment for the chemical addiction, and psychological therapy for the trauma around addiction

I don't know.

I said above:

>I don't know much about this area.

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

#518

Post by mike4ty4 »

andrepd wrote: post #445
comfortabledoug wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those "other quotes" are personal hunches and random people on the street? "I asked random people on the street", really? Come on... The simple fact is that after drug decriminalisation in 1999 the number of (1) new HIV infections and (2) overdose deaths fell to less than half in a couple years. After cuts in funding, it started performing worse. Who would have think.

Yep, exactly - get rid of the alternative methods and leave no method and then that's a problem.

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

#519

Post by gruez »

nickserv wrote: post #510
gruez wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Suffice to say: I have. Several people who were on self-destructive paths, of whom you could have said "well fuck him, the fucker doesn't want help and is a burden to those around him, why should I waste money and effort with him?". With the necessary support they are now entirely different persons. I didn't get the impression that the parent was against help. He explicitly mentioned providing rehab programs to thos…

Putting a bunch of addicts in an abandoned building so they can live in misery doesn't seem very helpful.

As per the parent comment, they're free to move into rehab if they so choose. They're not forced to live in misery.

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

#520

Post by mike4ty4 »

blowski wrote: post #366
Retric wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if we make it not simple, but "simply" exclude just one solution - lifetime punishment (prison + 40,000 collateral consequences, life imprisonment, or a death penalty) - directed against the persons with the problem, from the mix, and leave everything else as wide open as ever for consideration?
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