'Drug use is a health problem': inside one of the oldest legal consumption rooms

Re:'Drug use is a health problem': inside one of the oldest ... by vasco on Monday December 04, 2023 @10:23AM (#38518351)

Of course drugs given by a doctor are better and safer than drugs given by a street dealer, but the main point, which this series of replies seemed to ignore was this:

> In my opinion people are just medicating in other ways, but life still sucks.

Whatever the source of the issue was, we haven't fixed it. We just got better at dealing with the accute issues created by the hard street drugs, minimizing drug related crime and so on. But the answer shouldn't be to just pump all the would-be drug abusers full of ADs. Or maybe it is, what do I know.

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Re:'Drug use is a health problem': inside one of the oldest ... by kranke155 on Monday December 04, 2023 @10:41AM (#38518611)

>acute issues created by the hard street drugs, minimizing drug related crime and so on.

You talk about this as if its small potatoes!

These are major major issues that poison society even in richer countries like the UK. Having lived in London for half a decade and seen what a regime of prohibition has led to there - I would take the "flawed" Portuguese program.

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Re:'Drug use is a health problem': inside one of the oldest ... by vasco on Monday December 04, 2023 @11:21AM (#38519171)

My hat is off to Golão and I wish he could get direct funding from EU without local politics intervention. I think the impact at the time was amazing and the results are not debatable. So let me get that out of the way and agree with you in lots of things you've shared in this comment section.

My main point is I think we still have loads of mental health issues in Portugal, possibly masked by the super high rate of AD use in our population, which keeps growing. Daily dosages have more than doubled since 2009 (75 DD per 1000 people to 150 DD per 1000 people) and it's accelerating.

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