221–230 of 660 posts
And selling drugs should not be a fabulous glamorous advertised social endevour like marijuana in the USA.
Drugs should be sold like tobacco in Australia…. behind the counter, zero advertising, zero branding.
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.
They shouldn't be all that different. Vancouver (well, British Columbia) has tried to model its decriminalization efforts after Portugal's.
That decriminalization hasn't even been around for more than a handful of months, though, so it seems rather early for Vancouver to also be having doubts. Nobody was expecting things to change overnight; Health Canada allowed until 2026 to prove the model.
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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…
Also from the article > 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 the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. You'll notice that 2012 comes before 2019.
Why did it take nearly a decade to happen, then happen all at once?
Seems like something else changed more recently than the funding in 2012.
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…
Same sort of thing happened with mental illness in california, probably a leading cause of homelessness problems. Years ago, the law was changed to allow mentally-ill but benign or even non-ill people to escape the "snake pits", mental institutions that kept people incarcerated and drugged. This allowed lots of people to recover. But then Ronald Reagan (as governor of california) cut state mental illness funding. Now…
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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…
> 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.
The offence in that case isn't the drink, it's the driving. Maybe we should ban driving.
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Have you seen how much San Francisco and Seattle have improved with drug tolerant policies?
Or the person you're responding to is being sarcastic
You can’t just decriminalize owning drugs, you have to legalize selling drugs. That’s how you get rid of the criminals in the system. And selling drugs should not be a fabulous glamorous advertised social endevour like marijuana in the USA. Drugs should be sold like tobacco in Australia…. behind the counter, zero advertising, zero branding.
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…
Well, the american propaganda for ineffective War on Drugs needs to continue.
So long as people think that these are the problems in society (and not, say, billionaires) the government can keep creating ineffective policies to "fix" these problems (even though they haven't for god knows how many hundreds of years) and people lap it up.
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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 slashed funding to successful parts of the strategy and now claim the strategy failed. Neoliberalism in a nutshell.
You can’t just decriminalize owning drugs, you have to legalize selling drugs. That’s how you get rid of the criminals in the system. And selling drugs should not be a fabulous glamorous advertised social endevour like marijuana in the USA. Drugs should be sold like tobacco in Australia…. behind the counter, zero advertising, zero branding.
Except people start reselling legal drugs to the jurisdiction where they remain illegal... For this to work out as intended it would have to be planet-wide.