How do you see wether someone has eaten edibles?

That's not common in Amsterdam

> In Amsterdam when you go to a music festival you will not see a lot of pod heads

I could be wrong, but I don't believe marijuana is as-legal in Amsterdam as it is in California for example. In CA, there's very few enforced restrictions of where you can get it and where you can use it.

> Look at Portugals drug history. Legalization saved that country!

It doesn't appear so[1]. It appears they are struggling with the same issues - dramatic rise in drug use.

It's not really effective to just simply legalize all drugs. I agree with most, we shouldn't throw people in prison for drug use. No, instead we need to throw them into mandatory rehabilitation programs.

The goals of a decriminalization program shouldn't be to increase average citizen's drug use. But that's what happens without some sort of rehab/treatment program.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...

Disagree. Much more societal harm comes from the supply side (cartels, street gangs) than users, and much of the harm for/from users goes away if prices adjust to what they actually cost to produce (a tiny fraction of street price), and if the products are lab tested for potency and purity.

This pitched scenario has played out in exactly zero markets around the world, including all of the legal-marijuana states right here in the US.

Cartels aren't generally dealing in marijuana, it's small potatoes.

It's not just cartels in the classical sense.

In CA, it's cheaper to buy illegal marijuana than going to one of the licensed stores, for a whole variety of reasons.

That "market arbitrage" opens the door for a lot of things to occur - all things proponents of legalization promised would go away.

The market for hard drugs and marijuana are totally different.

Little bit of a straw man there. Nobody said they weren't different things.

The promises of the legalize-marijuana crowd have not become true. There is still crime revolving around marijuana in CA, it's more expensive than it was before legalization, and the tax revenue is a drop in the bucket for CA.

So all we "gained" was a bunch more people using marijuana...

You kinda did by talking about marijuana exclusively while I was talking about hard drugs.

> if prices adjust to what they actually cost to produce (a tiny fraction of street price)

Nothing. Absolutely nothing is priced at “actual costs to produce.” Nothing. I wish it were the case though maybe one day.

Sorry, I was imprecise in my wording... obviously there has to be profit, but not the 10,000%+ margins hard drugs "enjoy".

I am not a consumer of marijuana but in my observations of habitual users is nowhere near the same as someone addicted to heroin, and the severe physical and mental impact it has on their bodies. One could say alcohol and nicotine have such harmful effects, but not as dramatic and sudden as harder narcotics.

You get it in a lot of shops without any issues.

And that's the way for more than 10 years.

Even as a tourist

It looks like Portugal is having some serious issues with decriminalization.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...

The problem here isn't with decriminalization-- it's with lack of commitment to what they originally replaced enforcement with. From that article:

"Experts argue that drug policy focused on jail time is still more harmful to society than decriminalization. While the slipping results here suggest the fragility of decriminalization’s benefits, they point to how funding and encouragement into rehabilitation programs have ebbed. The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available.

João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding."

It was working great while they were committed to funding treatment programs and pushing users towards them.

> After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.

>cuts funding >Decriminalization doesn't work ! >not shocked

And the US is immune to such problems?

This, "but we'll do it better" argument seems to fall flat universally. Everybody thinks they can do it better, but nobody actually does...

Isn’t the whole point of decriminalization that we won’t have to spend as much money enforcing laws and locking people up? Funny how you never hear anyone sound the alarm about lack of funding in the early stages when everyone’s talking about what a success decriminalization is, only when the dark side of such policies start showing. “We knew this would happen all along!”

* * *

No that's not the whole point not even close , decriminalization works in reducing human suffering by using the money spent of emprisioning humans and spending it on programs etc .