Portugal’s radical drug policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

It seems to me that some of these discussions are mostly dominated by irrationality. This is particularly recognizable in the US, but also occurs in Europe to a degree that varies from topic to topic and country to country.

I believe there are two major factors at play. First, certain topics concern taboos that are still strong even in secularized societies. To these belong anything concerning human sexuality and some religious views. Second, certain topics have simply been hijacked by politicians, because they need positions that differentiate them from other politicians in a world in which most problems can and need be solved in a technical way. Criminal justice, gun laws, drug laws, healthcare, and climate change are such topics in the US. The discussion of these topics in the US barely makes any sense, because at least certain aspects of the problems related to them have perfectly objective solutions. But then US Democrats and Republicans would essentially defend the same policies and only differ on technical details, and that's not compatible with US election cycles.

A third 'problem' is perhaps a self-imposed and socially imposed limitation of freedom of speech that is particularly strong in developed humanist societies. What e.g. many US gun nuts really want to say is that the freedom of owning a gun outweighs the deaths by gun accidents and amok runs with guns, because freedom is such a high good and they like guns. A politician is not allowed to say that, however, and so the value ordering behind the policy is hidden behind insincere arguments that merely serve as a pretext. This happens everywhere, not just in the US, of course. I don't think this third issue is a problem, as it merely illustrates how evolved the societies are already. The social pressure is there for good reasons and fulfills an important role. (You don't want people starting rational arguments for introducing slavery, because it would lower their production costs. It's good when society endorses values that sanction such arguments even when they are purportedly rational.)

To make this clear, these phenomena occur everywhere in the Western industrialized world. Democratic politicians have run out of political positions, because most problems could be solved by experts and have one or more good technical solution.

(Note: In this post I mean 'technical' in the sense of τέχνη, as in 'technocracy', concerning instrumental means-end rationality.)

Laws come from culture but culture and attitudes also comes from laws.

I agree these complexities can't be ignored, but when I argue (perhaps less bluntly) that e.g. "The US should just ban handguns and implement single payer healthcare because it obviously works everywhere else"

Then what I mean is that with stricter gun laws, perhaps the culture and attitudes surrounding guns can be slowly changed. I'm not saying "if you change gun laws you'll see a positive effect on gun deaths within 5 years". I'm arguing that if the US changes gun laws perhaps there will be significant improvement in (just!) a couple of generations.

Is 80% of countries representing 20% population more meaningful 20% countries representing 80% population? (Arbitrary numbers to illustrate my point.) I realise this is quite pedantic but I think measuring "covered population" is more relevant than measuring administrative repartition especially with the Schengen factor.

Of course there's progress to be made either way but can you explain to me in what way my heuristic isn't appropriate to you?