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

There are a lot of places where civilian gun ownership causes problems, gun crime, etc. Some of the places where it does not cause big problems (eg Switzerland) have liberal gun laws and high ownership rates.

There are examples where widespread gun ownership/availability causes exactly the kinds of is "problems" that (according to some) the American founders intended it to cause. Basically, armed revolutions.

There are confusing examples where laws are liberal but ownership is rare. There are opposite examples.

I'm not saying ignore all this. If you want to learn about policy areas, you need to study examples. Just beware the anecdote, attributing cause and effect. Beware within heated political debates, they are known to cause insanity. There is rarely some objective fact that proves your argument, just a collection of facts that may, taken in context, convince you.

Back to drugs policy, Portugal had its own set of cultural norms, problems they were trying to solve, political considerations...

I think Mexico and some other big transit countries need to look at radical liberalisation options. Portugal is a good guide for some of their issues, but overall their situation is very different. They have nasty problems with the wholesale dealing, and the organized crime that goes with it. The street level crime and consumption is not their biggest problem, like Portugal.

Well, there's the current POTUS...

Implicit here is that when you say "experts", you mean people who share your terminal values and general way of thinking.

No, I'm really thinking about experts in the technical sense, based on instrumental rationality. Think of panels of domain experts from all political sides and how they can agree on a solution. And yes, they often can agree on a solution - or at least could - if they put their own political agenda to the side for a moment.

Your post makes it seem like you're having trouble stepping out of your value system to consider opposing views.

That's an unfair and unwarrented assumption. I have no problems stepping outside of my value system. I have no troubles understanding e.g. ISIS, social darwinists, very right wing positions, libertarians, etc. and have had discussions with all of these except members of ISIS.

You say, "most problems could be solved by experts". This is basically stating, "If I had absolute power all this could be solved easily."

If there is a meaningful relation between those two statements, you certainly haven't made it explicit. The experts in question can be as conservative as you like, if that appeases your mind - as long as they are able to distinguish between their own values and expert opinion about technical issues.

The reality is that the solutions you imagine wouldn't actually work the way you imagine they would. Because your values aren't ultimately the best ones in any absolute sense.

There are two claims here. The first one is empirical, and since I haven't discussed any particular solutions we can ignore this issue. The second one concerns the role of values. My claim is that the solution of most problems in modern societies has not much to do with values, but mostly will be based on technical issues aka means-end rationality. Not all of them, there is plenty of room for different values and democratic equilibrium between those. You're ignoring my central claim and don't back up your opinion.

The technocratic, power concentrating, "If only I was king!" tyranny impulse needs to be rejected at every turn.

I would consider myself an expert on the interplay between abstract values and technical rationality, as I'm currently leading a research project on this topic, but I'm decidedly not an expert in any of the domains that are relevant for the problems mentioned in my post. So your (personal?) critique seems off-topic. If I would be king that would probably be fairly bad for my country (although perhaps not so much if I'd listen to experts).

When I'm talking about experts I'm literally talking about professors with a high reputation among their colleagues and a proven track record of 40 years of peer reviewed publication in their domain who converge in expert panels to come up with solutions to given problems in some democratically legitimized way and who are not chosen on the basis of their beliefs or political views. Not about random people on social media or electrical engineers who debunk General Relativity or climate science.

Technocracy is tyranny is murder.

I used to think that in less drastic terms, too, but have changed my mind. Modern problems, especially their economic aspects, have become too complex for basic democracy and some strongly representational mechanisms are needed for democracy to work. Technocracy does not imply tyranny as long as proper division of power mechanisms are in place. (Whether the division of power is good enough in country X is another question and certainly debatable for some countries.)