Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 545 posts

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

#501

Post by gozur88 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #423
cellshade wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was an explicit compromise that was added in order to pass the original national background check legislation. A loophole is generally something unintended which this was not.

That doesn't appear to be a universally agreed upon distinction. https://financial-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Tax+Looph... > A deliberate or accidental provision in tax law that allows an individual or corporation to be exempt from some provision. Most loopholes are deliberate and are created to ensure that the law is not draconian, to please a lobbyist, or for some other reason.

Well, okay. In that case the word doesn't actually mean much beyond "this is the way the law is". What makes the "gun show loophole" rhetoric dishonest is it has nothing to do with gun shows.

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

#502

Post by mikeash »

nickik wrote: post #493
mikeash wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't the USSR or these Middle Eastern countries just enact gun control first, then enact these other policies without resistance?

Because people don't follow the law when they don't think the government legal code is legit.

Meaning enacting gun control wouldn’t actually work? Why do gun advocates worry about it so much?

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

#503

Post by Helmet »

scotty79 wrote: post #480
Helmet wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, many of us do. The vast majority of US gun-owners are not criminals, and the social problems that gun ownership seems to correlate with can be argued, debated, and squared away with "other" strong correlations, so the debate is certainly not settled. Both the American Revolutionary and Civil War have only hardened my position on the importance of gun ownership. There is a fundamental ideological divide between u…

> I simply don't trust the government and I believe in the right to arm and protect myself at any and all costs. But you are aware that your government has tanks, drones and vast selection of chemical weapons. Soon they'll have lethal drones small enough to make a person with gun just as harmless as a person without a gun. People that want guns, I feel, think they are living with their minds in the future where they…

All that technology, and yet a bunch of Vietnamese living in small villages and mud huts put up enough of a fight to create a permanent sore spot in US military history.

Also, those guys we've been trying to kill for the past 15 years in the middle east keep coming back fiercer than ever.

And who do you think operates all that fancy technology? Men who own guns and whose fathers owned guns before them. No, not all of them, but by and large. So I wouldn't be so sure that they would be on "your" side if push came to shove.

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

#504

Post by gozur88 »

jowsie wrote: post #355
gozur88 wrote: post #271

I'm not a big fan of Portugal's drug policy. You can buy drugs and take drugs, but not deal them? So you still have much of the crime associated with distribution. I'd like to see drug use legalized (not "decriminalized") in the US, and I'd also like to see distribution handled by regulated retailers, so potency and quality are uniform.

The primary purpose isn't to fight organised crime. It's to create treatment opportunities for the people using the drugs. Decrease the demand and the rest of the system will decrease on its own.

The article doesn't give any indication there was a decrease in drug use:

> While drug-related death, incarceration and infection rates plummeted, the country still had to deal with the health complications of long-term problematic drug use.

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

#505

Post by ramy_d »

ramy_d wrote: post #162
andrenth wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less handguns = less deaths. This does not follow. Take Brazil for example. 60k homicides per year, and guns are pretty much forbidden. Of course, criminals don’t seem to care.

shockingly true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Brazil

ouch, downvoted for sourcing a claim? thanks hacker news

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

#506

Post by Helmet »

mikeash wrote: post #502
nickik wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people don't follow the law when they don't think the government legal code is legit.

Meaning enacting gun control wouldn’t actually work? Why do gun advocates worry about it so much?

You keep regurgitating this line of reasoning like it's some sort of profound "gotcha" logical trap. We worry because we do not wish for things to escalate. And I can assure you, they will escalate, as armed separatism would be inevitable.

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

#507

Post by mikeash »

Helmet wrote: post #506
mikeash wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meaning enacting gun control wouldn’t actually work? Why do gun advocates worry about it so much?

You keep regurgitating this line of reasoning like it's some sort of profound "gotcha" logical trap. We worry because we do not wish for things to escalate. And I can assure you, they will escalate, as armed separatism would be inevitable.

I keep regurgitating it because nobody addresses it.

If the reasoning was “don’t pass gun control, or you’ll have an armed insurrection” then that would make sense. But that’s never what gun advocates say. They always portray gun owners as somehow being simultaneously the final bulwark against a tyrannical government, and vulnerable to even mild gun control laws.

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

#508

Post by AnthonyMouse »

alpha_squared wrote: post #474
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If puppy bites were traumatizing and frequently fatal, and we had 40k+ deaths per year from puppy bites, then yeah, I'd want to consider some puppy regulations. That's the point. We have that number of vehicle fatalities. We don't ban cars, we improve safety. Air bags, concrete barriers on divided highways, etc. There are a lot of things we could do to reduce the number of firearms fatalities that we aren't doing.…

Except that viable alternatives to cars are few and far between. Some cities have great public transportation and some have nearly no public transportation. And, as it's likely to turn out, when autonomous driving is mainstream enough, I'd wager quite a bit on the pressure to outlaw human driving in metropolitan regions. Because, as you point out, vehicles are unsafe. They just also happen to be useful without viable…

> The question I pose is, what are the primary uses for guns and their viable alternatives, if any?

At which point you're having the entire gun debate. Are more criminals deterred when it's more likely their victims are armed? Does that also work at the national level, in that it's easier to raise an army when more of your population already knows how to shoot, so other nations are less likely to attack? Does it deter domestic tyrants who know they would have to fight an armed insurgency, or give citizens more confidence to make just demands of a corrupt state? What's the economic value of the jobs created by that industry? What's the community value of it as a sport? Are there ways to reduce the harms without prohibiting anything?

If you want the answer it's necessary to have the debate, not pretend there is no debate to be had.

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

#509

Post by abiox »

bbot23 wrote: post #243
alkonaut wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This does not follow. If the ban didn't actually lessen the number of handguns, then we don't have the left hand side of the implication! These are two things: ban on handguns -> less handguns less handguns -> fewer deaths Someone argued that the second is true, and you seem to refute it by saying the first isn't. So maybe you aren't talking about the same thing. I'm going to argue that the second thing isn't contr…

Your implication fails in the real world in the same way that banning, demonizing, and siphoning drugs out of the country has failed. Yes, stricter laws, a buy-back policy and a generational shift will most definitely lower the current amount of guns in circulation in a given society. But just like with drugs, and sadly with a lot of gun-strict cities in the US, it has no bearing on the subsequent widening of the ill…

drugs involve physiological dependency and addiction, so the comparison seems like a stretch. consider that there aren't gang wars and other wild stuff going on (dealers on every corner) over banned substances like ephedrine, because there aren't strong secondary factors (addiction) propping up a significant demand to exploit.

as well, drugs are "the product" to a large semi-captured audience, but guns don't share this sort of situation. it's not clear that "illegal guns" and "illegal drugs" share much in terms of the market behavior.

most progressive drug reform isn't necessarily for legalized production and sale (perhaps it is for some libertarian progressives) - rather it's focused on decriminalizing most end-user behavior so they can both work with police without fear and have much improved access to help getting sober.

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

#510

Post by bonestamp2 »

j_s wrote: post #287
bonestamp2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should never downvote a comment just because we disagree with it. We should only downvote comments that don't contribute to the discussion. If someone is blatantly wrong, their information could be a common misconception that needs to be addressed and seen by everyone. Comments we disagree with are most often very good additions to the discussion and should be upvoted, even if they're factually inaccurate but ther…

As someone upvoting/downvoting this is an admirable approach, but as a commenter it's not how things work in practice. Double-hop to the most popular/ancient official endorsement via related discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?type=all&query=117171

I agree it's not how it happens, but if everyone was aware of and valued the approach then maybe someday it will happen.
Post reply on HN