This is a much more complicated issue than numbers from two countries could possibly tell.

[1] http://www.unodc.org/wdr2017/field/3.1_Mortality.xls

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_South_Korea

Supply of drugs has also historically been limited according to the following article that goes over drugs in South Korea at length:

- https://www.koreaexpose.com/drugs-south-korea-a-silent-crisi...

The quantities listed in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singapor... seems higher than what a user would have on them.

But at least they manage to make their prohibition policy actually effective: drugs are hard to get, and not a lot of people are actually behind bars or executed for trading.

(Compare with eg the US which incarcerates a lot of people, but the drug trade goes on regardless.)

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that there are many variables to consider, and a lot of them are less obvious, or less quantifiable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

I think our society would greatly improve from more mercy, and I miss that from growing up in Norway.

It seems many in the USA instead of trying something different when their opinions fail double down, because they believe conviction and force will somehow defeat actual evidence that it is just a terrible idea.

So punishments and pressure on police to take drug related crime extra seriously has for a long time been disproportionate to the impacts them have relative to other crimes.

Christians are the ones most preaching moderation, which might continue to attract some youngsters who see all the ridiculous things going on re alcohol and don't want to be part. Can be hard to explain sometimes that one does not drink for reasons other than religious or medical - the concept is a bit foreign.

We imprison far too many people in the US for minor drug offences, but it's definitely not in order to reintroduce slavery...

1) Incarcerates people at a higher rate than any country besides Seychelles

2) Abolished slavery for all persons except prisoners:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted..."

Between local, state, and federal prisons, we're looking at roughly 500,000 imprisoned for drug-related offenses[1]. Yes, the labor of these people is a trivial portion of the overall economy, but it still produces huge profit for those running the show: CoreCivic has a market cap of ~$2.6 billion. They exist to extract value from the lives and labors of the people who their institutions keep under lock and key.

There is a direct incentive for these corporations to increase the number of prisoners in the system, and they leverage their power to pursue that incentive, lobbying for and even drafting legislation that enforces three strike and mandatory minimum rules.[2] They are actively pushing governments to imprison more people, and profiting from the resulting state sanctioned slavery.

[1] https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/pie2017.png [2] https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/aug/22/study-shows...

It's still a hugely profitable business on its own for those involved, so that comparison is kind of beyond the point. Pimps profits also make for "a negligible part of the economy" but their profession is a thing.

>Prisoners do work, sure, but that's to pass the time.

If only.

https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21718897-idaho-...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/16/us-prisons-j...

They get to spend time outside prison and interact with people who aren't prisoners or guards. I could imagine volunteering for that if I was a prisoner. That doesn't make using prisoners as cheap labor OK, especially for dangerous jobs, but it doesn't surprise me at all that prisoners would rather do that than sit in a cell.

It's easy to make volunteers out of people if:

1) Their living conditions are so bad in your hellish prisons that that most alternatives seem like heaven.

2) you control their living conditions and can make their life hell if you want to "motivate" them to volunteer.

3) A crappy legal system hands them some of the harshest terms in the world in some of the more BS prisons, and having them volunteer for such work can give them more "points" towards getting our earlier.

What I'm getting at is, volunteering for an inmate is not necessarily the same thing as volunteering is for a free man -- or even the same thing as a prisoner in a place without medieval prison conditions and vindictive attitude towards prisoners volunteering.

Whether that is good, bad or indifferent is a whole different matter, but I think it is safe to say that it is a thing.

AFAIK, Slaves would be categorized as capital expense, which is different than labor and would use a different measure for economic output.

When slavery was a thing It was not negligible. It made up a good portion of the southern economy.

I doubt 1 in a million products are made by prisoners.

There are a lot of young dems and republicans that are at also against the current war on drugs - mainly as it pertains to marijuana, but still [2].

Glad to see Norway making headway in the right direction here. Hopefully my countries (Germany and USA) can follow suite at some point, rather sooner than later.

Finally, when will the USA and other countries start using metrics, data, experiment, and testing to drive policy instead of following public opinion or philosophical / moral stances that are based on nothing and which are continuously being invalidated or minimally given ample evidence for optimization by any data allowed to accumulate?

1. http://news.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx 2. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/27/63-of-republ...

Reason 2: opiates poured into the population via healthcare system for some reason (because pain bad, lobbying good)

Reason 3: People who are drug addicts have universal healthcare, whereas I'm guessing a lot of drug addicts are lacking good insurance in the US. Not the people who have taken overdoses are rejected from the emergency room in the US - but preventive care, free treatment for addiction, regular health checkups etc. are probably less common among addicts where they don't have universal healthcare.

And among the worst offenders are the liberal states of Sweden, Norway, Denmark etc..

So - having extreme anti-drug laws combined with nationalist/patriotic crazy authoritarian government is the policy to go with?

I'm kidding .. but you see that it's hard to look at that chart and make out more than Apples to Oranges.

It's also worth pondering how Eastern Europe has a tiny fraction of the problem that West seems to have, except for Estonia, which seems of the charts. It really is a tricky graph.

E.g. death due to X tends to depend greatly on what the policy is on autopsies and other checks, and whether or not there's any pressure on coroners to speculate about cause of death vs. just pronounce a generic reason.

In Norway for example, an autopsy only happens rarely unless there is a reason to expect foul play, mostly because it's seen as expensive and unnecessary. As a result, a lot of "natural causes" or "heart failure" can obscure more specific causes that will only be recorded if accompanied by e.g. police observations.

Then, even if you do tests, there's the question of how you record deaths where there are multiple possible causes. E.g. you might have heart failure possibly due to a combination of alcohol and other drugs. Depending on your reporting system you might put it down in any number of different ways.

Then on top of this, you have to consider what make people use, not just what potentially make people not use. It could be the differences in legal system, or just that other societal differences makes fewer people predisposed to want to use in the first place.

All of this basically makes it impossible to compare country to country and conclude that changes in a single area such as law enforcement makes a difference.

The reason we look to Portugal is not primarily because it looks good compared to other countries, but because it performs well compared to itself prior to decriminalisation, and because it was a recent change.

Really? That's interesting. In neighbouring Finland, an autopsy is standard practice whenever the medical cause(s) of death is not completely clear.

Anyway, it's a relevant point that you make about death being caused by multiple factors, and crediting the causes in statistics is a game that can be played.

Found that out when my dad died in 2000, and we asked for one - we didn't expect foul play but he'd struggled with alcohol problems in the past and for closure we wanted to understand if he'd gotten back into drinking and that might have been why he died (he had heart problems and were on drugs that would have made combining them with alcohol a likely cause).

The coroners office made it very clear that that since it was clear he died from his heart stopping and there was no immediate reasons to suspect that there were any external factors that'd make a difference to the primary reason of death and no suspicion of foul play, an autopsy was out of the question unless we were prepared to cover the full costs (which were fairly steep).

That he may or may not have taken his heart medicine or may or may not have combined it with alcohol was to them irrelevant as long as it didn't change the main cause and they had no reason to see the distinction as relevant.

If there was doubt about the major cause, such as e.g. if he'd had a head wound or something else that might have indicated another cause, it might have been different.

This might very well also vary from coroners office to coroners office in some countries depending on capacity. This was in Oslo, so would have been one of the busiest areas.

I hear that word used a lot over here in the UK, usually by people on right of the political spectrum, but the word sounds rather pejorative to me. I presume the people using it mean "users of drugs, excluding alcohol" in order to differentiate themselves from the users of the other drugs.

And, I think this is confused labeling. Substance abuse alone does not make anyone a danger to you.

So, substance abuse: a) person goes to a daily job, drinks a bottle of wine in the evening, does some coke, goes to sleep. repeats ad infinitum. b) person has a really bad addiction, needs money, so he robs you

I presume your talk about fear and judgement was more about scenario b rather than a, but both are about a person with substance abuse problems. The thing we don't actually like in b) is the stealing, not the substance abuse per se.

If we did that, it would be rational, and an improvement. The unfortunate truth is that we tend to judge people for being outsiders, so while alcohol causes much more harm to others than heroin or crack cocaine (citation below), “we drink alcohol so it must be fine”.

Same with terrorists: if the killer is one of “us” they are “a troubled lone wolf”, if the killer is one of “them” then “that just goes to show how nasty they all are”.

Same with child abusers: “stranger danger” is what people worry about, but most documented abuses are committed by close relatives.

(Relative harm: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_harmfulness#/media/File...)

Why this need to judge?

It is particularly odd given a country where such a high proportion claim to be Christian, and perhaps ought to follow the instruction to leave it to their God to judge people.

More people using drugs isn't automatically undesirable, as more people abusing drugs is.

Too often drug use is equated with drug abuse, but it need not be so. It's possible to use drugs and not have them affect your life negatively, or even have them affect your life positively (as in the case of the various psychedelic therapies out there to tread everything from PTSD to depression, using psychedelics to enhance one's creativity or for problem solving, or arguably psychedelic use in sacramental/religious contexts).

Another thing to consider when looking at raw statistics that might show an increase in drug use is that people are more likely to honestly report their drug use if they think they won't be punished for it, and conversely are more likely to lie about it if they thought they might get punished or stigmatized for it. In the case of Portugal, their non-punitive approach increases the odds that people will be more honest about their drug use, so the apparent increase in drug use might be just surveys finally reporting the truth about already-existing drug use. Real drug use there might have stayed the same or even decreased while showing an increase on paper.

Rates of injecting drug use have decreased.

Drug use in adolescants have decreased.

Rates of harm have decreased dramatically.

I question the measurements of harm, which I believe in the Portuguese case is in terms of diseases/hospitalizations/deaths. Everyone knows high-functioning people who have alcohol or drug problems, who will probably not show up in such measurements of harmful use, but who nonetheless suffer personal and family problems due to their habit.

Also, this article, though a little dated, seems to contradict your claim about drug use in the last 12 months.

https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/133086356/Mixed-Results-For-P...

>While people reporting drug use over the course of their lifetime has gone up, somewhat significantly in the last decade in Portugal, people reporting drug use over the last 12 months of their lives has actually gone up only slightly.

And again, Portugal didn't have much of a drug culture to begin with. Where drug use is a much greater and ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, like in the US, it is very plausible that decriminalization would lead to significantly increased use.

There's not much point continuing the conversation if you're going to cite 6 year old radio interviews between journalists who don't bother to cite their sources.