9 ms·

Bottom line, deaths from overdose: Drugs criminalized, USA: 185 deaths/million people/year Not criminalized, treatment focused Portugal: 6 deaths/million pe

• refurb 9y ago
  I would say that chart is pretty good proof that decriminalizatiin is NOT the biggest driver of reduced overdose deaths. How do i know? Some of the countries on that list have exceeding low deaths, but have no decriminalized drugs at all.
• whatyoucantsay 9y ago
  Thank you for updating your comment.
• asabjorn 9y ago
  It’s great to see Norway do the rational think and replicate the success of the Portuguese system instead of the catastrophe of the American. I think our society would greatly improve from more mercy, and I miss that from growing up in Norway. It seems many in the USA instead of trying something different when their opinions fail double down, because they believe conviction and force will somehow defeat actual evidence that it is just a terrible idea.
  • shams93 9y ago
    Yeah unfortunately here we use the drug laws to effectively reintroduce slavery. Its legal under US law to use prisoners as slave labor. As we used to say in the 90s people in the 'hood don't have planes. By the 2000s rather than the CIA cocaine and heroin smuggling we saw Wallstreet move in and the rise of the Oxycontin era where Wallstreet shareholders have been directly benefiting both from selling opiates to the masses and then from their slave labor when they land in a private prison after converting from oxy to heroin addiction.
    • meri_dian 9y ago
      Not true at all. The amount of goods produced by people in jail is a negligible part of the economy. Prisoners do work, sure, but that's to pass the time. We imprison far too many people in the US for minor drug offences, but it's definitely not in order to reintroduce slavery...
      • Cookiesaurusbex 9y ago
        Prisoners in California are being used as firefighters. It's not an easy or safe job and I'm pretty sure they aren't doing it just to pass time.
        • Zak 9y ago
          A quick search reveals that all of the inmates doing that job are volunteers. They get to spend time outside prison and interact with people who aren't prisoners or guards. I could imagine volunteering for that if I was a prisoner. That doesn't make using prisoners as cheap labor OK, especially for dangerous jobs, but it doesn't surprise me at all that prisoners would rather do that than sit in a cell.
          • coldtea 9y ago
            >A quick search reveals that all of the inmates doing that job are volunteers. It's easy to make volunteers out of people if: 1) Their living conditions are so bad in your hellish prisons that that most alternatives seem like heaven. 2) you control their living conditions and can make their life hell if you want to "motivate" them to volunteer. 3) A crappy legal system hands them some of the harshest terms in the world in some of the more BS prisons, and having them volunteer for such work can give them more "points" towards getting our earlier. What I'm getting at is, volunteering for an inmate is not necessarily the same thing as volunteering is for a free man -- or even the same thing as a prisoner in a place without medieval prison conditions and vindictive attitude towards prisoners volunteering.
            • 9y ago
  • vidarh 9y ago
    It's been a long slog in Norway too, though, and there's still substantial pressure from groups that peddle outright lies about the dangers of drugs. Norway has long had some of the worst drug policies in Europe, in part because there is significant split in Norway between on one hand a focus on a human justice system, and on the other hand a puritan lutheran and evangelical community that sees all drugs (including alcohol) as a moral failing. So punishments and pressure on police to take drug related crime extra seriously has for a long time been disproportionate to the impacts them have relative to other crimes.
    • jononor 9y ago
      Thankfully the puritans are loosing foothold day by day. In 30 years their influence will be seriously reduced. Most kids born today won't even have grandparents that are personally religious and practicing.
    • jononor 9y ago
      Alcohol culture still needs some improvement though, lots of unhealthy aspects. Every-weekend binge drinking, unable-to-express-unless-drunk, drunkeness-absolves-responsibility relatively common. Christians are the ones most preaching moderation, which might continue to attract some youngsters who see all the ridiculous things going on re alcohol and don't want to be part. Can be hard to explain sometimes that one does not drink for reasons other than religious or medical - the concept is a bit foreign.
• jfaucett 9y ago
  this. I looked up some current polling on drug issues and it blew my mind how backwards most of the USA still seems to be on this issue. [1] I mean at least the desire to legalize marijuana is increasing but on other issues in the "war on drugs" topic, the outlook doesn't look so great. There are a lot of young dems and republicans that are at also against the current war on drugs - mainly as it pertains to marijuana, but still [2]. Glad to see Norway making headway in the right direction here. Hopefully my countries (Germany and USA) can follow suite at some point, rather sooner than later. Finally, when will the USA and other countries start using metrics, data, experiment, and testing to drive policy instead of following public opinion or philosophical / moral stances that are based on nothing and which are continuously being invalidated or minimally given ample evidence for optimization by any data allowed to accumulate? 1. http://news.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx http://news.gallup.com/poll/1657/illegal-drugs.aspx 2. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/27/63-of-republican-millennials-favor-marijuana-legalization/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/27/63-of-republ...
  • ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." -- John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief for President Richard Nixon when the administration declared its war on drugs in 1971
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• ygaf 9y ago
  I don't like your bottom line. Tell me how many fewer Portuguese people are affected by the crimes and pressures of druggies, not how many fewer of the criminals themselves have accidents. (one of the replies to that article says that Portuguese drug use fell period, so this is rhetorical)
  • marcoperaza 9y ago
    Portuguese drug use has gone up in fact. But Portugal isn't even a good test case because it's a country that didn't have much of a drug culture to begin with. It's not very helpful to cite it as a useful test case for possible American drug policy, as people have been doing lately.
    • pmoriarty 9y ago
      "Portuguese drug use has gone up in fact." 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.
      • DanBC 9y ago
        On top of what you've all said drug use in Portugal has only gone up if you look at "have you ever in your life, even if only once, used drugs?"
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• adnam 9y ago
  And Japan?
• gok 9y ago
  Drugs highly criminalized, South Korea: 0.1 deaths/million people/year [1] This is a much more complicated issue than numbers from two countries could possibly tell. [1] http://www.unodc.org/wdr2017/field/3.1_Mortality.xls http://www.unodc.org/wdr2017/field/3.1_Mortality.xls
  • thomastjeffery 9y ago
    One point that may be significant is that South Korea has only one land border, and it is heavily guarded.
    • che_shirecat 9y ago
      how is this significant in any way to the topic of drug-related deaths?
      • jrs95 9y ago
        It relates to how drugs get into the country, and what drugs get into the country. In the case of the U.S., the Mexico border is a huge problem. It probably didn't help that the CIA was selling automatic weapons to the cartels, either...
      • BigJono 9y ago
        It's much easier to catch someone smuggling drugs through an airport than it is stopping someone from walking over an imaginary line that's thousands of kilometres long. So less drugs in circulation, which would have an effect on death rates.
        • craftyguy 9y ago
          Koreans have boats, and a very large coastline...
          • mc32 9y ago
            Sure, but their closest marine neighbor is also very hard on drugs and drugs dealers (Japan).
• StanislavPetrov 9y ago
  Deaths from overdose vastly under-describes the terrible toll of the drug war. Countless millions of Americans are locked in cages and have their lives destroyed by the "justice" system even if they never overdose. Countless millions of children in the US grow up without parents and subsequently end up as broken people, because their parents were locked in cages for drug-related "crimes". And this doesn't consider the trillions of dollars we have squandered as a nation pursuing the "war on drugs", or the severe damage to our freedom as a people we have suffered via the destruction of our civil liberties in the prosecution of this senseless attempt at drug prohibition.
• alkonaut 9y ago
  Legality is just one reason. There are many.- Reason 2: opiates poured into the population via healthcare system for some reason (because pain bad, lobbying good) Reason 3: People who are drug addicts have universal healthcare, whereas I'm guessing a lot of drug addicts are lacking good insurance in the US. Not the people who have taken overdoses are rejected from the emergency room in the US - but preventive care, free treatment for addiction, regular health checkups etc. are probably less common among addicts where they don't have universal healthcare.
• alexasmyths 9y ago
  By the same graph, drug deaths are even lower in Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary than in Portugal. And among the worst offenders are the liberal states of Sweden, Norway, Denmark etc.. So - having extreme anti-drug laws combined with nationalist/patriotic crazy authoritarian government is the policy to go with? I'm kidding .. but you see that it's hard to look at that chart and make out more than Apples to Oranges. It's also worth pondering how Eastern Europe has a tiny fraction of the problem that West seems to have, except for Estonia, which seems of the charts. It really is a tricky graph.
  • nottorp 9y ago
    I'd say income - even marijuana is expensive, not to mention the strong drugs - and the availability of decent booze for cheap.
  • vidarh 9y ago
    You really need to look at trends more than absolute numbers, or you will run into the issue of actually verifying that the numbers are comparable. E.g. death due to X tends to depend greatly on what the policy is on autopsies and other checks, and whether or not there's any pressure on coroners to speculate about cause of death vs. just pronounce a generic reason. In Norway for example, an autopsy only happens rarely unless there is a reason to expect foul play, mostly because it's seen as expensive and unnecessary. As a result, a lot of "natural causes" or "heart failure" can obscure more specific causes that will only be recorded if accompanied by e.g. police observations. Then, even if you do tests, there's the question of how you record deaths where there are multiple possible causes. E.g. you might have heart failure possibly due to a combination of alcohol and other drugs. Depending on your reporting system you might put it down in any number of different ways. Then on top of this, you have to consider what make people use, not just what potentially make people not use. It could be the differences in legal system, or just that other societal differences makes fewer people predisposed to want to use in the first place. All of this basically makes it impossible to compare country to country and conclude that changes in a single area such as law enforcement makes a difference. The reason we look to Portugal is not primarily because it looks good compared to other countries, but because it performs well compared to itself prior to decriminalisation, and because it was a recent change.