How are you defining successful? The linked article links to a recent wapo article from last week "Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts". I don't know one way or the other, I'm just trying to collect more data points. Didn't Vancouver BC try something similar?
(Seems a little odd that this Atlantic article, the Wapo article questioning Portugal's policy, and yesterday's Times article about weed addiction have all appeared in a week's span. Since none of them seems triggered by an external reporting event.)
I'm asking because I've noticed newspapers have somehow acquired the ability to imply that spending on this or that program is being cut, when in fact it isn't. Often simply refusing to let a program grow at an exponential rate is supposed to be a "spending cut". And sometimes mere exponential growth is not enough.
To give an example, if one trusts the newspapers of the United Kingdom, the NHS is supposed to have been "underfunded" ever since Cameron became prime minister in 2010. The reality is that expenditures on that system have remained at around 9.7% of GDP until COVID when they rose to 12%, remaining at that level since then. And GDP is a quantity that's growing every year.
If "properly funding" hard drug legalization would require expenditures on rehab programs that steadily grow until they reach a third of all government revenues, that in and of itself makes legalization a horrible policy.
> 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.
The only groups in this merrygoround of policy torture that have a vested financial interest in not solving drug use problems.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-cuts-nhs...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9722661/David-Came...
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-cameron-se...
Cameron effectively cut £500 million from the NHS budget by redefining what the budget was and then claiming the budget increased. The result is that Cameron was ordered to stop claiming that he increased NHS funding.
Obviously it's not as simple as X and 2X, but constant real-term pay drops have led to lower staff levels leading to more agency staffing (where a private company takes a tidy slice of profit for every hour worked), policies such as selling off NHS buildings for NHS Trusts to have to rent them back have been put in place, and shit like that has happened across the board.
Ultimately, the tory party hates that the NHS is public not privately run, have gradually been pushing to change that, and have excellent PR that's persuaded many people that it's the useless NHS's fault for all of this. Those pesky doctors who don't care about people!
The reality is that they cut the things that add cumulative pressure to the NHS itself. E.g - social care cuts meant that thousands of beds occupied by medically fit people were occupied because they had nowhere to send those people to. The "underfunded" thing is a simplistic and borderline misleading way of phrasing it but with the attention economy that we're in I can see why they'd phrase it that way
And "successful program" ?
Your UK example doesnt include the denominator -- the number of people needing care. GDP growth is not correlated to the number of people needing care, so using it to normalize spend isn't right. The %GDP needs to be going up to maintain funding levels
We need a hard look at this problem because particularly on the West Coast of US and Canada, and particularly SF and northward, it is making a mockery out of the free-spiritedness and open-mindedness that folks here would espouse. We don't set boundaries on detrimental behavior. The way people OD in the streets here is not okay. The violent behavior of addicts on the BART is not okay. Then on the other end of the spectrum, when someone "important" in the community does something awful around here, other people will try to encourage reconciliation by taking on smaller doses of that bad thing. As if that makes it less bad. It's absolutely insane. It's like this whole place has given up on trying to do better, societally. It's like personal accountability has broadly flipped on its head. The folks who have chosen homelessness over getting clean / sanity / whatever are really just the tip of the iceberg.
Issue A gets some funding to try a New Approach... and so on.
One of the worst parts about this cycle is that people will point to Issue A and say, "We've been throwing money at the problem for years and nothing works!" and give up and/or decide that they are now against funding Issue A.
This cycle happens constantly.
I would also challenge your implicit notion here that there is a binary pass/fail solution to societal levels of drug addiction. Like any seriously hard problem there are policies that have been proposed and implemented around that world that have some positive outcomes in some regards and negatives in others. Incarceration (the Drug War) theoretically makes serious drug addiction absent from public life, a positive, but with the result of growing the police state, a negative. Vice versa for Oregon’s policy, now that it’s run for a while. I think we’re recently finding that Portugal’s approach which Oregon based their policy on also does not have better than expected outcomes, although the data is early yet.
That is significantly more than what's recognized as a good sample size.
> What's needed is data on many alternative approaches, what policies _and_ executions taken as one promote better outcomes? > Over what timeframes?
This is where the goalpost shifting happens.
I can not think of a single instance in recent history where a political leader has admitted that a policy they like has failed because it was fundamentally a bad idea.
Not PP, but the onus is always on the person or group making the affirmative claim. It _might_ be that the policy is sound but the execution is in error, but we should not _assume_ that the policy is sound.
But they're both making an affirmative claim. One says that legalization is better and all these addicts are an error in execution. The other says that criminalization is better and all this widespread disrespect for the law and erosion of civil liberties and mass incarceration and cartel murder squads are an error in execution.
In general the burden should be on the party who wants make something illegal.
By the same count we don’t judge the mentally unwell and children as if they’re well-functioning adults.
By the same count we don’t judge the mentally unwell and children
as if they’re well-functioning adults.
The onus is on you to prove your positive statement.
If you like and implement a policy, you can't hand wave a failure blaming random stuff.
I think even if we don't know what is the right way to go about drug policy, we can probably agree that sticking your head in the sand and pretending there's no debate to be had is probably not the best approach.
While I do agree that prohibition is probably not the answer, calling the Portuguese policy a "success" kind of misses the forest for the trees[1]. The most obvious problem is funding (which Porto is running out of): life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years. Not to mention that the latter is also more popular with voters.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/once-hailed-for-decrimi...
There are plenty of drugs in jails. Sticking someone in jail is a very expensive and unlikely to be effective way to treat their addiction.
Keep in mind that I have no idea how to "fix" this, and it's a very complicated issue, so I'm just trying to spark conversation. If we look at historical examples (e.g. opium dens), it's rarely these societal issues fixed themselves with more lenient social policies (they often, in fact, got worse).
Opium was prohibited even after the opium wars. That's not a good example of non-prohibition but instead the knockon effects of worst of both worlds informal, capricious quasi-legality.
> The counter-example is Prohibition (which was an abject failure), but maybe this is (at least in part) due to the cultural importance of alcohol of so many people. I don't really think cocaine or meth are such cultural lynchpins.
I mean, people haven't really stopped doing Cocaine or Meth, and the most negative effects of prohibition (extremely violent organized crime) still seem to be present.
Yep, which is why I used the term "more lenient policies," not necessarily non-prohibition. Opium dens were getting more and more problematic in San Francisco[1] until they were criminalized in the late 19th century.
> I mean, people haven't really stopped doing Cocaine or Meth
I don't think the end goal of prohibition is zero use of said substance, but rather its control as to prevent large-scale societal disruption.
[1] https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Chinatown%27s_Opium_...
The point is that prohibition the issue. Being more lenient while still keeping prohibition isn't a half way point, but still keeps the most harmful elements intact.
> I don't think the end goal of prohibition is zero use of said substance, but rather its control as to prevent large-scale societal disruption.
Do you think that prohibition is effectively preventing large scale societal disruption?
Copied & pasted from Wikipedia:
"Alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.[7]
Specifically, "rates for cirrhosis of the liver fell by 50 percent early in Prohibition and recovered promptly after Repeal in 1933."[4] Moore also found that contrary to popular opinion, "violent crime did not increase dramatically during Prohibition" and that organized crime "existed before and after" Prohibition.[7] The historian Jack S. Blocker Jr. stated that "Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect."[8] In addition, "once Prohibition became the law of the land, many citizens decided to obey it".[8] During the Prohibition era, rates of absenteeism decreased from 10% to 3%.[9] In Michigan, the Ford Motor Company documented "a decrease in absenteeism from 2,620 in April 1918 to 1,628 in May 1918."[6]
It took that long to repeal because it was an amendment (and thus needed another amendment to repeal it). The rest of your post basically says people drank less therefore less people drank (it's obvious that if less people drink, less people will have alcohol problems). I'm not sure if the academic consensus is that it was "mixed," most top search results seem to agree that it was kind of a failure[1][2], but to be fair I never studied it in depth and Google can be biased.
[1] https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/alcohol-prohibition-was...
[2] https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/united-states-histor...
I'm not really clear what you're trying to argue here. Could you be more explicit?
Prohibition fell out of popularity, so to me it seems like it was a failure because it didn't significantly impact domestic policy in the long-term. As opposed to something like women's suffrage.
Citation needed, you might be underestimating how much it costs to jail someone. If a drug user actually manages to get clean (which with proper support, most can) then the cost of support is basically checking up on them a couple of times a year. Meanwhile they can hold down a job and live a normal life.
That's as opposed to the significant costs of keeping someone in prison, which is significantly more than they would be earning if they were free.
Ah, I was assuming the drug addict (or at least a signification portion) wouldn't be getting clean. A large part of Portugal's policy is focused on safe drug use (decriminalization, clean needles, drug dispensaries, etc.).
Consider this: if drug use is criminalised, then seeking help increases your risk of getting arrested!
It's worse than that. If someone is working a productive job, even if they don't make much, they're doing something useful. Someone has their dishes washed or their floors swept and there is a surplus that accrues not only to the worker but also the rest of society.
If someone is in prison, not only do you lose that surplus, you have to extract tax dollars from some other productive activity and use it to pay prison guards and consume real estate, which money could have been used by the government to do something useful, or to lower taxes so the taxpayer can do something useful.
Prison is an enormous net loss on both ends.
While I agree that the prison-scenario costs are probably underestimated and underappreciated... If we're going to try to measure the "doing something useful" part, we should also consider the other side of "doing something destructive to other people and property" part.
Someone could hold down a job and be cutting catalytic converters out of other people's cars.
Suppose nonviolent criminals get sentenced to restitution and community service and only go to prison if they fail to complete their community service. Now you want to go out stealing catalytic converters and you're going to find that doing a bunch of free labor while giving half the wages from your paid labor to your victims is a lot less profitable than just doing honest work.
Legalize and harm reduction have been the tenets for so so long. No one does it.
I'm genuinely asking because I've mostly thought of "harm reduction" as actions to prevent issues like the spread of disease through needles or the lacing of street drugs. Which are important no doubt, and perhaps legalization (w/ heavy regulations) + harm reduction would be better than the current highly flawed system. There are just some drugs that are so destructive to their users that I don't see how they can be sufficiently fought without some force at some step.
There are doubts about success of that policy now. Article from a few weeks ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...
The [Portugese drug offense] committees have a broad range of sanctions available to them when ruling on the drug use offence. These include:
Fines, ranging from €25 to €150. These figures are based on the Portuguese minimum wage of about €485 (Banco de Portugal, 2001) and translate into hours of work lost.
Suspension of the right to practice if the user has a licensed profession (e.g. medical doctor, taxi driver) and may endanger another person or someone's possessions.
Ban on visiting certain places (e.g. specific clubbing venues).
Ban on associating with specific other persons.
Foreign travel ban.
Requirement to report periodically to the committee.
Withdrawal of the right to carry a gun.
Confiscation of personal possessions.
Cessation of subsidies or allowances that a person receives from a public agency.
Meanwhile Oregon's (and much of the West Coast's) idea of "decriminalization" is just... No consequences for doing hard drugs! Here's Oregon's law, from the article:
To achieve this goal, Measure 110 enacted two major changes to Oregon’s drug laws. First, minor drug possession was downgraded from a misdemeanor to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. Under the new law, users caught with up to 1 gram of heroin or methamphetamine, or up to 40 oxycodone pills, are charged a $100 fine, which can be waived if they call a treatment-referral hotline. Second, the law set aside a portion of state cannabis tax revenue every two years to fund a statewide network of harm-reduction and other services.
You don't even have to pay the fine! You can just call a hotline. No follow up, no ensuring that you go to treatment... Just a phone call.
The idea that you can have no consequences for hard drug use, and that people will just voluntarily check themselves into "services" (or that "harm reduction" services will dissuade people from using hard drugs) is I think at this point dead in the water.
I used to be in favor of broad drug decriminalization. But the opioid epidemic changed my mind: some drugs are so bad that even when administered by a regulated medical system, large numbers of people's lives can be ruined simply by giving them access to the drug. Allowing street usage of similar drugs like heroin, fentanyl, etc can't be safer than that. I don't necessarily think jail is the best option, but zero-consequence + entirely-optional treatment for opiate abuse is not a working policy, and IMO jail is actually a better policy than that: at least in jail you have a chance at forcing them off the drug. My preferred policy at this point would probably look more like mandatory state-enforced rehab in a confined setting without long-term legal implications like a criminal record, though.
Less-addictive drugs like marijuana, ketamine, MDMA, etc I think probably should be legal for adults, with some guardrails around access similar to e.g. Sudafed. But effectively having an open season for using opiates is asking for trouble.
Basically I think this is the right approach. Drug use at low levels in endemic. I don't think it makes sense for huge swathes of otherwise law abiding citizens to be technically criminals. It ends up with grossly distorted demographic distributions of those that suffer legal consequences in deeply unfair ways. Criminalisation on use also aligns the interests of users with those of dealers, where differences in criminal liability help drive a wedge between them.
The 3 year old policy in Oregon looks like it was fumbled. They didn’t put in place essential social and health care support services that a policy like this relies on for 2 years. Portugal has a national health care service, so a co-ordinated approach seems like it was far easier to implement and co-ordinate. Still, Oregon seems to have made much needed improvements in this area.
Policies like this are not silver bullets. Drug abuse is a severe issue with deep roots in individual lives and society, and manifests differently in different societies. I hope Oregon sticks with it and works on trying to get this policy to work, and tailor their response to their needs. 50 years of the war on drugs has failed utterly, let’s give an alternative a chance.