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This policy should make sense to anyone who has ever had any involvement with someone with an addiction. Generally the addiction is a symptom of other problems,
by hartror 15y ago
This policy should make sense to anyone who has ever had any involvement with someone with an addiction. Generally the addiction is a symptom of other problems, often mental illness, that if treated appropriately would help prevent a slide back into addiction.
I would be interested to see a comparison of the total cost of this policy contrasted against, for example, the US style. Certainly I would expect the initial outlay to be greater in the Portuguese style system but as it gets people out of the system for good the lifetime cost should be lower. While I don't like to have everything measured with a monetary cost, social and moral duties are important, it would make it an easier sell to law makers and their constituents.
- barrkel 15y agoIf you talk to an economist, they'll find a way to put monetary values on "social and moral duties"; there are all sorts of tricks for teasing them out. Money is just a score, a way of measuring and quantifying things (and of course, if you're not measuring, it's not science, in so far as social science is ever science).
- danssig 15y agoI can't imagine the US style being cheaper in the short term either. You have to look at everything the "war on drugs" implies and all those costs. Stopping people from using things that naturally grow in the ground is insanely expensive.
- justincormack 15y agoMexico is paying much of the cost of the US policy, so it might still be a hard sell.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]