"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."

It did work well. It doesn't now. What changed in between then and now is funding and commitment to getting addicts into treatment-- the founding principle of the program to begin with.

I have reached a conclusion that in order to evaluate the “success” of Portugal’s policies and how they can translate to other places, then I would like to know what kind of addictions it succeeded for and for what proportion of people and for which addictions.

That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.

Generally, successful public programs often stop being successful when they stop recieving funding. That is a fact. The resources used to pay for the portugal program were redirected from enforcement. Perusing the wikipedia page, the stats seemed a lot more encouraging than any similar ones I've seen from a country with war-on-drugs type policies, but I'm not an expert.

Not everything scales well. Sometimes you just have to spend to fix.

I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled? Those asks cannot coexist: if drug abuse is costing society billions or trillions of dollars in resources to fix, why do we allow it in the first place?

> The money is more important than people being rehabilitated?

I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes. Eventually, they have to take responsibility for their own choices, especially if we have allowed that choice (if you think drug crime is victimless so shouldn't be punished is true).

> I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes.

It looks like you don't understand which part you don't actually get. While Portugal's program was being funded properly, the increase in drug usage was no different from nearby countries that did not change their drug laws. Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time. But what about the cost? Well, it seems to have saved a boatload of money on enforcement.

“The most important direct effect was a reduction in the use of criminal justice resources targeted at vulnerable drug users,” says Alex Stevens, professor of criminal justice at the U.K.’s University of Kent, who co-authored the study. “Before, a large number of people were being arrested and punished for drug use alone. They saved themselves a lot of money and stopped inflicting so much harm on people through the criminal justice system. There were other trends since drugs were decriminalized in 2001, but they are less easy to attribute directly to decriminalization.”

https://healthland.time.com/2010/11/23/portugals-drug-experi...

The hippies over at Forbes seem to think that ending canabis prohibition will help the US recover economically from the pandemic like ending alcohol prohibition helped end the great depression.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kriskrane/2020/05/26/cannabis-l...

But what about the collateral damage of all this rampant treating-instead-of-imprisoning-people-for-drug-use? Well, The International Journal of Drug Policy said:

"Taking into consideration health and non-health related costs, we find that that the social cost of drugs decreased by 12% in the five years following the NSFAD's approval and by a rather significant 18% in the eleven-year period following its approval. Whilst the reduction of legal system costs (possibly associated with the decriminalization of drug consumption) is clearly one of the main explanatory factors, it is not the only one. In particular, the rather significant reduction of health-related costs has also played an important role."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...

Surely the stalwart right-wing CATO institute will set the record straight on the fallout from such an irresponsible policy:

"While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many EU states, those problems—in virtually every relevant category—have been either contained or measurably improved within Portugal since 2001. In certain key demographic segments, drug usage has decreased in absolute terms in the decriminalization framework, even as usage across the EU continues to increase, including in those states that continue to take the hardest line in criminalizing drug possession and usage."

Yep, they did.

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/greenwald...

Marijuana isn't illegal in the US anymore (at least where I live). Fentanyl, which is basically laced into all hard drugs these days, I guess you could argue that they are going to be dead in one or two years anyways? I guess that's tough love for you.

Hey, marijuana should be legal...and here in Washington state at least it is. The biggest problem with marijuana, due to dumb federal rules, is that the (non-marijuana) drug addicts are more likely to do armed robberies of dispensaries because they are cash only businesses.

But let's not bait and switch here: "marijuana has been shown to be manageable, so let's allow people to do all the fentanyl they want" is not very logical. A lot of teens are just dying on their first experience with fent (or something they got that had fent in it that they didn't know about!). These aren't the same things at all.

It's funny that you mention Salt Lake City, because that example is commonly misunderstood and actually illustrates the exact opposite of what you're pointing out.

Utah set out to solve chronic homelessness. The causes and effects of chronic homelessness are completely different from transient or episodic homelessness, and the three require different approaches. Utah eliminated 91% of chronic homelessness within ten years, using a Housing First policy. After they ended the policy, total (not chronic) homelessness increased. The majority of that increase was from non-chronic homelessness, which was not targeted by their policy and which was increasing even before that policy ended (because it was, well, independent of a policy that was... not aimed at addressing it). Chronic homelessness has increased in Utah since the end of the program in 2015, but the overwhelming majority of homelessness that's reported on in Utah is still not chronic homelessness, because chronic homelessness makes up less than 20% of the homeless population.

It's odd to look at that as "the problem never ends", because the problem (chronic homelessness), did very nearly end, until the state decided to end the program and go back to their own ways.

> 2023 report reflects a 96% increase in people experiencing chronic homelessness since 2019, but also indicates Utah is making headway in developing deeply affordable housing

For however you define chronic, I guess.

>Chronic homelessness refers to people who have experienced homelessness for at least a year, either continuously or in four or more separate instances within the past three years, while also experiencing a disabling condition such as a physical disability, severe mental illness or substance use disorder.

It's quite a leap of logic to look at an increase in chronic homelessness after ending a program that empirically reduced chronic homelessness using a straightforward mechanism, and conclude that the most probable explanation is "outright fraud, necessitating a decade-long conspiracy involving many people and organizations with opposing goals collaborating with each other, and which somehow has resulted in zero tangible evidence surfacing even years after the alleged conspiracy fell apart".