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.