This scenario doesn't just happen with drug policy, but with practically any divisive policy discussion.
People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere.
Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Every time a country goes through the process of debating whether to legalise gay marriage, there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society, or ruin the sanctity of marriage, or cause God to punish us.
However, legalising gay marriage in other countries hasn't caused the sky to fall. But anti-gay marriage people conveniently ignore this.
The same wilful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to Universal Healthcare, drug laws, minimum wages (for either raising or lowering/removing), criminal justice, firearms, and education.
Obviously countries are all different, but the general ideas are the same. For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is, however, an Australia or British-style "ban handguns and buy them back off owners" isn't going to work in America. But the same principle applies, less handguns = less deaths.
I don’t know. Republicans had warned us that legalizing gay marriage would lead to widespread acceptance of pedophiles. And look now only a couple of years later the Republicans are fully supporting an alleged pedophile who is running for Senate. If you read that as more of a threat than a warning it all makes sense :)
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.)
The risk with this sort of meta-discussion is that it drowns the original question about drug policy in an ocean of other relevant questions. I think it would be more interesting to line up the countries that are currently close to trying out a similar policy to Portugal and finding ways to support the movement or at least discuss the particular, national, issues faced.
> For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is
But that's just a talking point. It's like saying if there are less silver cars, there are less car accidents involving silver cars. That doesn't tell you anything about whether it makes sense to ban silver cars. You can insert literally anything into that sentence and it's still true. If there is less food, less people will get food poisoning. If there is less water, less people will drown in water.
It doesn't prove anything, it's just sophistry. We obviously shouldn't ban water, which implies the question of whether we should ban guns is more complicated than that.
But the sky has fallen. For these people the big evil is the thing they are fighting against. They dont want gay marriage not because of its impacts but because they dont want gay marriage. Full stop. They dont want to decriminalize drugs because they dont want them decriminalized. When an issue becomes so internalized, so tied to ones identity, it is impossible to change. We need to work on keeping people from identifying themselves so much by which actions they permit in others.
If you're going to look elsewhere, that opens up a new can of worms about what to consider or ignore. Take gun laws. Wildly divergent in law. Widely divergent in practice. wildly divergent in results.
I agree that the debate often ignored existence proofs, but... It can be hard to take this a whole lot further.
The Aussie gun example is used mostly because the narrative fits. The Tassie shooting leading to a buyback. But, there are lots of counties with all sorts of policies and realities. Which to compare to? Details can matter, as can all sorts of context.
Not all policies, broadly applied, work in all cultures, economies, and environments. Ignoring the local context of a nation's unique situation is a recipe for disaster.
> This scenario doesn't just happen with [just?] drug policy, but with practically any divisive policy discussion.
I agree with that. It has been very illuminating for me to watch how large groups of people get to consensus. Whether it is something like women wearing pants or if it is ok to smoke cigarettes in a restaurant. My interest has been that sometimes, when one is a part of a larger group, one might want the group to change to a new consensus.
As the article points out, there is a certain amount of collective pain that has to be experienced before you can motivate a critical mass of the group to switch to a new point of view. I wonder if the opioid crisis that is afflicting the US has inflicted that much pain yet.
>there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society
Well, just look at the US. Political correctness is getting totally out of hand and the same is happening more and more in European countries.
Changing traditions causes a lot of entitlement in people who also feel that they should get a special treatment and it seems that there's no end to it. In a democratic society, entitlement from small groups is a societal cancer.
And equal legal partnership rights aren't even good enough for many. They absolutely need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning for hundreds of years. It's like these people intentionally try to cause trouble and I can understand why others don't want any of it.
Any citation on fewer handguns, fewer deaths? Violent crime actually increased in the UK after they banned guns despite near simultaneous expansion of police funding.
These issues aren’t as simple as you might imply. The demographics of Sweden are different than those of Chicago or Matamoros. Conroe, Texas has very high gun ownership and very low violent crime. New York has very low gun ownership and relatively low violent crime.
Cancer death rates are higher in the UK compared to the US despite “universal” healthcare in the UK.
It’s naïve to draw simplistic cause-effect conclusions and it’s intellectually dishonest to suggest that policies that work in Lisbon would work at a similar level of success in Los Angeles.
To be clear, I am all for decriminalization of drugs, however suggesting that policies will have similar effects in different regions or countries is to ignore the thousands of other variables at play.
People fear the unknown. Also to most people drug culture is repugnant and they don't realize that only a small minority of users are "drug culture." In reality, most of the users are their neighbors, friends, and family members, and they have no idea it is happening.
It's obviously quite a good deal for politicians. They get political victories by whipping a minority that can't fight back, and by stirring up angst among the ignorant. They also fuel the prison industrial complex, which I increasingly believe is a thing.
It's the sunk cost fallacy. When you've invested enormous amounts of treasure, careers, political capital, conventional wisdom, etc., in having a position, it is very, very hard to say "oops, that's all a big mistake, my bad!"
One thing that people aren't considering is that we have legalization experiments within the United States, and we have seen an uptick in marijuana usage[1]. This uptick has been benign because its been limited to Marijuana. I think that given our culture (one that I believe is potentially universal, but I can not speak to universality) has a tendency toward over consumption, its not clear to me that legalization of drugs would lead to decreased usage. I'm not advocating continuing our failed drug war, just caution when considering legalization, it may still be the best way forward.
There's a lot here that needs to be picked apart. Here are the major things you're missing:
1. Marijuana has been researched extensively and its health effects are at worst similar to alcohol, at best significantly less bad for you. In that context it makes sense to think of marijuana as a consumer product, and it makes sense that requiring a consumer product be sold in a dangerous and unregulated way would reduce demand for that product. Under these conditions we can expect legalization to increase demand, and it has.
2. Portugal's policy is decriminalization not legalization, and its success has not really been about soft drugs, it's been about hard drugs. People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently for the same reason people without mental illness do not drink bleach: it's bad for you and if you care about yourself self-preservation is important. Portugal's solution is about the people who don't or are unable to care for themselves, and recognizing that the drug use is a symptom of that, and that you cannot fix the underlying mental issue by putting people in cages. Their solution is not "stop doing anything and fully legalize," it's "require people to be treated" instead of "require people to sit in a cage." Under these conditions we can expect decriminalization to decrease demand, and it has.
Edit: Also, I do very much agree with your larger point re: overconsumption, and I'm not saying we should ignore that problem either. Mental health in this country is a disaster, I just don't think putting people in cages is the solution.
I haven't heard it argued that legalizing drugs would decrease usage. Just that it would lead to safer usage, reduce crime, destigmatize addiction and allow for better treatment of addicts.
One things Marijuana legalization has done is decrease opioid usage in states that have legalized it. It has also reduced drunk driving rates. Of course taxes are nice, and removing the money from the underworld is a big win too.
The benefit of legalizing marijuana is not to decrease usage but to cut financing to dealers. It is also safer for users, and reduces the risk to exposure to more dangerous drugs.
How has this affected tax revenue on these legalization experiments? How has this affected drug related crime as well? Is this increase bad? I would love for someone to dig up these answers as I have referenced Portugal's policy in many arguments, but never the ones we have been trying out here at home as they are newer and often more restrictive in comparison.
Agree. And it is not clear if other factors aren’t responsible for the reduction in Portugal too. Like regular cigarettes aren’t cool anymore, people increasingly are looking for healthy living habits. Would be interesting to compare if cocaine use in other Southern European countries also reduced over that period.
It feels kind of awkward to try to ban cigarette while promoting cocaine use at the same time.
That being said as a libertarian I am of the opinion that it’s not for the state to tell people how to live their life, and if they aspire to become junkies, let them live.
Isn't that a desirable thing from a government standpoint? More tax income from legal sales? The point to legalize something is that you put some controls in place to know where and how, and at what quality it's being sold, not to have its consumption decrease.
Because drug policy is about associating your political opponents with criminal activity and has nothing to do with preventing drug abuse or addiction.
> “There was a point whenyou could not find a single Portuguese family that wasn’t affected. Every family had their addict, or addicts. This was universal in a way that the society felt: ‘We have to do something.’”
To be noted is when is it more useful to decriminalise, compared to conventional methods?
I would say there is a point, say 5% or 10% population already users when it becomes more beneficial to decriminalise. This works because most of the society has already seen the problems associated with drug use. Anything before that (say 0.1% of population are users) and you may end up encouraging non-users since the legalisation may be seen as a form of approval from the state that there is nothing wrong with drug use.
Criminal justice in the western world is substantially based on the (faulty) premise of retributive punishment. Not rehabilitation, not harm reduction, vengeance. That has a ton of negative consequences. It means that prisons are horrid and destroy people rather than building them back up to a state worthy of re-entering civilized society. It means that the police are encouraged to dispense street justice extra-judicially (even up to executions) because it is part and parcel of the spectrum of "hurting the bad guys". It means that addicts are punished and harmed by the system for the sin of being vulnerable and falling victim to a common "vice". It's not about science, it's about feeling what is "right" and "just". Bit by bit we've occasionally made some improvements and injected some humanity into this brutally inhumane process, but we're still scraping by at medieval levels of justice. In the US more than 95% of executions by the criminal justice system happen on the street without a trial. And, of course, addiction is treated as a crime instead of a public health concern, to the detriment of all.
IME, human beings generally expect things that are true to be intuitive, and tend to interpret causality eagerly. The history of science is littered with folks that ended upon the wrong side of it because their intuition couldn't be rationalized (the earth _not_ being flat, for instance).
It doesn't surprise me that many countries will be very slow to change. Change would require citizens to invest in understanding the research and to recognize that the "obvious" solutions to drug addiction aren't necessarily the effective ones.
Each country needs to have its own thing. In Brazil for example, a measure like this wold not have any impact because we do not have control over our borders.
Take smoking for example. Even if tabacco its alowed, its really expensive to buy legalized cigarrets.
So peoplo just smoke cheap ones, that enter from Paraguai border, with no quality control, and brougth in Brazil by organized crime, or even produced in clandestine factories.
Just legalizing everything here wold not make a diference.
The nastier side of this elephant in the room is that three letters in general, the CIA in particular, really dislike the fact that congress holds their purse strings, so by creating and then dominating a black market, they can generate money off the books with no congressional oversight for those black projects and whatever other unconstitutional fad of the day is.
The CIA learned this all the way back in its OSS days from the Brits who have been doing it since before the first opium wars in China, the scars of which which can still be seen to this day. It doesn't matter the black market (prohibition for example) just that you control it.
This is great. But I sometimes wonder if the people who advocate for "x worked for y, so it is best practice and every should do it" appreciate situation complexities and cultural differences?
The interesting thing is that although the relative success with decriminalization of drugs in The Netherlands was one of the examples that inspired many other countries to liberalize their policies, The Netherlands itself did not make any progress at all in the last thirty years and even reversed some policies.
Marijuana is still officially illegal, coffeeshops cannot run a 100% legal business and small growers have been systematically persecuted. Only big, criminally run enterprises remain with the typical organized crime problems as a result.
It's no longer legal to amphetamines-related drugs at electronic parties and related drug-related deaths because of too strong or impure XTC are on a rise. Magic mushrooms are banned from sale because some tourists in Amsterdam had bad trips. And there was this story about a man slaughtering his dog that was awfully similar to those Marijuana stories in the 20's: https://www.expatica.com/nl/news/country-news/Man-kills-dog-..., amongst other "sudden" mushroom scare stories in the press.
Although because of lack of actual knowledge about these kind of substances allowed the sale of magic truffels to continue everywhere where before the mushrooms were sold, the magic mushroom scare stories in the media suddenly stopped.
It really saddens me that even more successful and better regulated policies from other countries are not followed in The Netherlands.
I've visited Lisbon last week. I had at least 15 different guys offering me heroin, cocaine or LSD in various parts of the city. This never happened to me before but I didn't realise it used to be such a big problem. The point is, if someone wants to get drugs, he/she will just get drugs. I think the best prevention is awareness and I think this policy might have gotten them this far but they seem to need a different approach to go further.
It's a rather silly question on the surface: all countries have different cultures. Often very different. That alone is enough to answer the posed question.
Much of the world might copy it. It's not going to get copied overnight, that's not how big change occurs in a culture. Portugal was culturally ready for it. Things like this always start very slowly and then gain momentum.
The US might even copy it given enough time, it will probably take two decades though. The US notoriously tends to slowly get around to things (although it did legalize gay marriage before ~96% of the rest of the planet). It goes back to the old joke about the US trying everything else first before finally doing the right thing, it's a partially accurate assessment of US history.
“What about you? Why don’t you go shave off that beard? You can’t give up on yourself, man. That’s when it’s all over.” The bearded man cracked a smile.
In answering questions like that, like "X solves this big societal problem why don't we use X?" I think the reasons have little to do with the problem in question. It usually boils down to who profits from the current status quo.
Chasing The Scream by Johann Hari is a really good book for anyone who's more interested on learning more about how Portugal went about the decriminalization and just a really interesting book in general on the war on drugs.
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.
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|8 years ago|reply
People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere.
Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Every time a country goes through the process of debating whether to legalise gay marriage, there's a bunch of people that say it's going to cause the corruption of society, or ruin the sanctity of marriage, or cause God to punish us.
However, legalising gay marriage in other countries hasn't caused the sky to fall. But anti-gay marriage people conveniently ignore this.
The same wilful ignorance of existing examples is also applied to Universal Healthcare, drug laws, minimum wages (for either raising or lowering/removing), criminal justice, firearms, and education.
Obviously countries are all different, but the general ideas are the same. For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is, however, an Australia or British-style "ban handguns and buy them back off owners" isn't going to work in America. But the same principle applies, less handguns = less deaths.
[+] [-] IgorPartola|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanstrange|8 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] dingdingdang|8 years ago|reply
There's slightly older (2009) systemic review of Portugal's drug policy and it's effects available at: https://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/drug-decrimina... which is also interesting and has fair bit of stats to back the discussion up with.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|8 years ago|reply
But that's just a talking point. It's like saying if there are less silver cars, there are less car accidents involving silver cars. That doesn't tell you anything about whether it makes sense to ban silver cars. You can insert literally anything into that sentence and it's still true. If there is less food, less people will get food poisoning. If there is less water, less people will drown in water.
It doesn't prove anything, it's just sophistry. We obviously shouldn't ban water, which implies the question of whether we should ban guns is more complicated than that.
[+] [-] sandworm101|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|8 years ago|reply
I agree that the debate often ignored existence proofs, but... It can be hard to take this a whole lot further.
The Aussie gun example is used mostly because the narrative fits. The Tassie shooting leading to a buyback. But, there are lots of counties with all sorts of policies and realities. Which to compare to? Details can matter, as can all sorts of context.
[+] [-] chrisco255|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randyrand|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knolan|8 years ago|reply
https://www.skepticink.com/humanisticas/2013/03/23/is-the-io...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
I agree with that. It has been very illuminating for me to watch how large groups of people get to consensus. Whether it is something like women wearing pants or if it is ok to smoke cigarettes in a restaurant. My interest has been that sometimes, when one is a part of a larger group, one might want the group to change to a new consensus.
As the article points out, there is a certain amount of collective pain that has to be experienced before you can motivate a critical mass of the group to switch to a new point of view. I wonder if the opioid crisis that is afflicting the US has inflicted that much pain yet.
[+] [-] Tyco|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VeronicaJJ123|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yAnonymous|8 years ago|reply
Well, just look at the US. Political correctness is getting totally out of hand and the same is happening more and more in European countries.
Changing traditions causes a lot of entitlement in people who also feel that they should get a special treatment and it seems that there's no end to it. In a democratic society, entitlement from small groups is a societal cancer.
And equal legal partnership rights aren't even good enough for many. They absolutely need to have it called marriage, a word that has had a different religious meaning for hundreds of years. It's like these people intentionally try to cause trouble and I can understand why others don't want any of it.
[+] [-] ueushzvzis|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andrenth|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bsder|8 years ago|reply
Suddenly, the "Christians" are trying to elect a pedophile to US Senate. Coincidence? I think not.
Who has the pool on when they try to elect on Congressman with a bestiality tape?
<Yes, /s, just in case someone can't figure it out ...>
[+] [-] mmjaa|8 years ago|reply
(More violent knife crime, though. This goes ignored by the anti-gun nuts.)
[+] [-] briandear|8 years ago|reply
These issues aren’t as simple as you might imply. The demographics of Sweden are different than those of Chicago or Matamoros. Conroe, Texas has very high gun ownership and very low violent crime. New York has very low gun ownership and relatively low violent crime.
Cancer death rates are higher in the UK compared to the US despite “universal” healthcare in the UK.
It’s naïve to draw simplistic cause-effect conclusions and it’s intellectually dishonest to suggest that policies that work in Lisbon would work at a similar level of success in Los Angeles.
To be clear, I am all for decriminalization of drugs, however suggesting that policies will have similar effects in different regions or countries is to ignore the thousands of other variables at play.
[+] [-] freedomben|8 years ago|reply
It's obviously quite a good deal for politicians. They get political victories by whipping a minority that can't fight back, and by stirring up angst among the ignorant. They also fuel the prison industrial complex, which I increasingly believe is a thing.
My two cents.
[+] [-] WalterBright|8 years ago|reply
It's much easier to double down on it.
[+] [-] malydok|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheArcane|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] workthrowaway27|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irritant|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrden|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.rmhidta.org/html/FINAL%20NSDUH%20Results-%20Jan%2...
[+] [-] wdewind|8 years ago|reply
1. Marijuana has been researched extensively and its health effects are at worst similar to alcohol, at best significantly less bad for you. In that context it makes sense to think of marijuana as a consumer product, and it makes sense that requiring a consumer product be sold in a dangerous and unregulated way would reduce demand for that product. Under these conditions we can expect legalization to increase demand, and it has.
2. Portugal's policy is decriminalization not legalization, and its success has not really been about soft drugs, it's been about hard drugs. People who do not have some kind of mental illness do not use hard drugs frequently for the same reason people without mental illness do not drink bleach: it's bad for you and if you care about yourself self-preservation is important. Portugal's solution is about the people who don't or are unable to care for themselves, and recognizing that the drug use is a symptom of that, and that you cannot fix the underlying mental issue by putting people in cages. Their solution is not "stop doing anything and fully legalize," it's "require people to be treated" instead of "require people to sit in a cage." Under these conditions we can expect decriminalization to decrease demand, and it has.
Edit: Also, I do very much agree with your larger point re: overconsumption, and I'm not saying we should ignore that problem either. Mental health in this country is a disaster, I just don't think putting people in cages is the solution.
[+] [-] eberkund|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BatFastard|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabrice_d|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkroy|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|8 years ago|reply
I would expect drug usage to increase when legalized.
[+] [-] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
It feels kind of awkward to try to ban cigarette while promoting cocaine use at the same time.
That being said as a libertarian I am of the opinion that it’s not for the state to tell people how to live their life, and if they aspire to become junkies, let them live.
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
Isn't that a desirable thing from a government standpoint? More tax income from legal sales? The point to legalize something is that you put some controls in place to know where and how, and at what quality it's being sold, not to have its consumption decrease.
[+] [-] yosito|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moduspol|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jun/05/singap... [2] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24428567
[+] [-] andrewstuart|8 years ago|reply
When selling is legal is when organized crime leaves the picture, taxes can be collected, product is clean and measured and of quality.
Both sides of the equation are important to legalize, doing one without the other means huge problems remain.
[+] [-] abtom|8 years ago|reply
To be noted is when is it more useful to decriminalise, compared to conventional methods? I would say there is a point, say 5% or 10% population already users when it becomes more beneficial to decriminalise. This works because most of the society has already seen the problems associated with drug use. Anything before that (say 0.1% of population are users) and you may end up encouraging non-users since the legalisation may be seen as a form of approval from the state that there is nothing wrong with drug use.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] froderick|8 years ago|reply
It doesn't surprise me that many countries will be very slow to change. Change would require citizens to invest in understanding the research and to recognize that the "obvious" solutions to drug addiction aren't necessarily the effective ones.
[+] [-] major505|8 years ago|reply
Take smoking for example. Even if tabacco its alowed, its really expensive to buy legalized cigarrets.
So peoplo just smoke cheap ones, that enter from Paraguai border, with no quality control, and brougth in Brazil by organized crime, or even produced in clandestine factories.
Just legalizing everything here wold not make a diference.
[+] [-] arca_vorago|8 years ago|reply
The CIA learned this all the way back in its OSS days from the Brits who have been doing it since before the first opium wars in China, the scars of which which can still be seen to this day. It doesn't matter the black market (prohibition for example) just that you control it.
[+] [-] thisisit|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dep_b|8 years ago|reply
Marijuana is still officially illegal, coffeeshops cannot run a 100% legal business and small growers have been systematically persecuted. Only big, criminally run enterprises remain with the typical organized crime problems as a result.
It's no longer legal to amphetamines-related drugs at electronic parties and related drug-related deaths because of too strong or impure XTC are on a rise. Magic mushrooms are banned from sale because some tourists in Amsterdam had bad trips. And there was this story about a man slaughtering his dog that was awfully similar to those Marijuana stories in the 20's: https://www.expatica.com/nl/news/country-news/Man-kills-dog-..., amongst other "sudden" mushroom scare stories in the press.
Although because of lack of actual knowledge about these kind of substances allowed the sale of magic truffels to continue everywhere where before the mushrooms were sold, the magic mushroom scare stories in the media suddenly stopped.
It really saddens me that even more successful and better regulated policies from other countries are not followed in The Netherlands.
[+] [-] arcool|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adventured|8 years ago|reply
Much of the world might copy it. It's not going to get copied overnight, that's not how big change occurs in a culture. Portugal was culturally ready for it. Things like this always start very slowly and then gain momentum.
The US might even copy it given enough time, it will probably take two decades though. The US notoriously tends to slowly get around to things (although it did legalize gay marriage before ~96% of the rest of the planet). It goes back to the old joke about the US trying everything else first before finally doing the right thing, it's a partially accurate assessment of US history.
[+] [-] Lapsa|8 years ago|reply
^ powerful stuff
[+] [-] zaro|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adeshpande|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gozur88|8 years ago|reply
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.