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Talk about burying the lede, 11 years ago they privatized their drug oversight operation and cut funding by over 80%. Gee, I wonder if that could have an impact
by virgildotcodes 3y ago
Talk about burying the lede, 11 years ago they privatized their drug oversight operation and cut funding by over 80%. Gee, I wonder if that could have an impact?
> 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.
- api 3y agoThat sounds like SF's outsourcing to nonprofits.
- vngzs 3y agoIndeed. They slashed funding to successful parts of the strategy and now claim the strategy failed. A convenient narrative for politicians, but hardly truth.
- themitigating 3y ago[flagged]
- cudgy 3y agoYou forgot: Large company complains that costs are rising for the services they are providing. “We need to give more money to large company because they cannot make a reasonable profit and the company is funding my reelection campaign.” Large company sells personal data gathered from citizens to other private companies, homeland security, and whoever else wants to pay the toll. “What a sweet deal! The citizens are paying out of their wallets and their personal privacy.”
- themitigating 3y agoI didn't forget that, I didn't mention it because we're discussing the government of Portugal, California, and government services being cut. I can't tell if this is some weird whataboutism like "yeah maybe the republicans but how about them companies, since they're also bad that kinda shows that everyone is, really no point in getting mad at Republicans right?"
- cudgy 3y agoI guess your not used to people agreeing with you.
- themitigating 3y agoYou're not agreeing with me, you're offering up another opinion unrelated to what I said.
- ROTMetro 3y agoI'm hoping this new court ruling that the Government can't go directly to companies and must go through the process if it involves civil rights (in the current case the Biden admin talking to social media sites about removing content is a violation of the first amendment) gos through and some lawyer get's it applied to all rights (in the case of your example to government going to companies to get around people's right to privacy).
- themitigating 3y agoI'm hoping that Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and every member of the Republican party elected to office who lied/is lying about election fraud faces justice. 18 U.S.C. § 2384 - U.S. Code - Unannotated Title 18. Crimes and Criminal Procedure § 2384. Seditious conspiracy "If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to...or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.... they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."
- bugglebeetle 3y ago> They slashed funding to successful parts of the strategy and now claim the strategy failed. Neoliberalism in a nutshell.
- bolangi 3y agoIt's a bit like the matrix, wherever something good and helpful starts to develop anywhere, an agent in a green suit appears to put a stop to it.
- eimrine 3y agoCrabs in a bucket?
- FooBarBizBazz 3y agoI don't think so. The crabs are peers who pull each other down. This is more like the industrial seafood conglomerate that dragnetted the seabed, put you in the bucket, and now wants to push the lid down tighter.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bboygravity 3y agoPortuguese politicians are doing the same with the public healthcare system there (deliberately underfunding it to be able to claim that it "failed"). They want to follow the "good" example of the US, like most other EU member states are now doing.
- pjmlp 3y agoWhile public healthcare is still quite ok in Portugal, anyone that actually wants to be treated in time, and not be stuck in waiting lists actually goes to a private doctor, or clinic. Hence why having private insurance as part of the job benefits is widely appreciated, unless one is a public employee with nice health packages like ADSE. I am approaching 50 now, and seldom ever had a family doctor for example. However in Germany it is much worse, where public healthcare is almost managed as the private one, and where many doctor offices differ their treatments depending on which kind of insurance one has, public vs private. You get different waiting rooms, different treatment proposals, different appointment flexibility,...
- WeylandYutani 3y agoPeople with private insurance skip the line. You're literally condemning a poor person to suffer more. Congratulations. Doctors triage based on medical needs not your social status or financial wealth in the Netherlands. It's one of those things that ethically sets this country above others and I hope it never changes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cinntaile 3y agoA lot of EU member states have high taxes too, there is not that much wiggle room to increase taxes to pay for ballooning health care costs. It is not surprising that they are trying to keep costs under control or privatize.
- Aerroon 3y ago
- gumby 3y agoWish I could have upvoted this comment a couple of more times.
- mavu 3y agoI've got your back.
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoWhy should the state spend any money here at all? If you want the freedom from society to use drugs, then you shouldn't rely on society for that.
- arcticbull 3y agoThe argument for why the government should spend money is because not spending it would be more expensive or yield worse outcomes.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago[flagged]
- EA-3167 3y agoYou seem to be acting as though addiction and the issues which give rise to it are somehow not part of society, and therefore should be discarded. Even ignoring why that's wrong, ignoring why letting people slip through the cracks still has an impact on your conception of society... ...how about basic human empathy?
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago> ...how about basic human empathy? How about empathy from your side? I have lost a friend due to addiction despite "care". The best solution is not being exposed to some classes of drugs at all and fixing other issues that cause this.
- EA-3167 3y ago[flagged]
- cscurmudgeon 3y agoNo, what does that have to do with drugs? Sex doesn't mess you up like hard drugs.
- asymmetric 3y agoDelegating to nonprofits is not the same as privatizing. Your argument creates a false dichotomy in which the only two possible actors are the state or private enterprises, but that’s not the case, even for the simple reasons that nonprofits are not the same as for-profit entities. Common Pool Resources are a prime example of a paradigm that escapes this dichotomy.
- SllX 3y agoI don’t know how Portuguese law works but in the United States non-profits have private owners and are private corporations. The contrast they have is with “for-profit” corporations, not “private” corporations. Given the primary purpose of being designated a “non-profit” is a tax advantage for the corporation, I’m willing to bet Portuguese corporations likely don’t differ in this manner. Privatize is an acceptable verbiage for a government or government-owned entity which has outsourced to a private corporation.
- samtho 3y agoIn most situations, a non-profit entity cannot be owned by a corporation in such a way that would give it controlling interest. If you are planning on filing for tax exemption, this is absolutely the case. A non-profit, however, can own (partially or completely) a for-profit corporation and have controlling interests.
- SllX 3y agoSure, but also that doesn’t contradict the nature of a non-profits as corporations with a private ownership structure. Non-profit is the colloquialism for a corporation with a certain status per a statute that grants the corporation some tax exemptions in exchange for their ability to return a profit. The corporation receives a benefit for this status and is subject to stricter accounting rules, but is still a private corporation in and of itself.
- skissane 3y ago
- m463 3y agoSame sort of thing happened with mental illness in california, probably a leading cause of homelessness problems. Years ago, the law was changed to allow mentally-ill but benign or even non-ill people to escape the "snake pits", mental institutions that kept people incarcerated and drugged. This allowed lots of people to recover. But then Ronald Reagan (as governor of california) cut state mental illness funding. Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others". Many homeless people are these mentally ill people, and they can't get help (and they can't be forced in unless they are dangerous, which is usually how recovery begins)
- themitigating 3y agohttps://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-mental-hospitals-contribute-to-homelessness-here https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta... This nice timelime adds to what this person said. There's more that helped shape the publics perception of mental health. The movie "One flew over the cukcoos nest" seemed to create a negative perception about these facilities. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1983.53.1.179?journalCode=prxa https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1983.53.1.1... This study in 1983, though small, showed that 4 out of 5 people who were questioned before the film was released ,then after, changed their view of mental institutions to negative. They also showed them a TV documentary that was more factual about the mental health system but it didn't have an impact. In my opinion this is case of the public hearing about a systemtic issue within a very nessacary institution, regardless of how frequent or serious, becoming upset, locking their view in, then the government taking action by either reducing or eliminating that institution.
- izacus 3y agoWell, the american propaganda for ineffective War on Drugs needs to continue.
- throwaway77384 3y agoYup, fictitious enemies are always needed to keep the machine running. Terrorists, gays, foreigners, trans people, drugs. So long as people think that these are the problems in society (and not, say, billionaires) the government can keep creating ineffective policies to "fix" these problems (even though they haven't for god knows how many hundreds of years) and people lap it up.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoYou should have added billionaires to your list then.
- nelsonic 3y agoWhoever approved the cut in funding by 80% needs to be in prison for the harm they have caused.
- disgruntledphd2 3y agoThat would probably be the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission, i.e. the Troika.
- raverbashing 3y agoand > nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right. You mean like a west-coast American city?
- comfortabledoug 3y agoWhat about the other quotes from the article that have nothing to do with funding... > “When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,” said Keith Humphreys, former senior drug policy adviser in the Obama administration and a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University. “Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.” > Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab. And in Oregon... > extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation. Meanwhile, overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent. Why fund services that go unused?...Tent cities don't exist solely in places without access to housing, and giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is a death sentence.
- doalldrugs 3y ago> Why fund services that go unused?...Tent cities don't exist solely in places without access to housing, and giving an addict 4 walls and privacy is a death sentence. Sounds like they've already dying. Would you suggest we stop all drug treatment and let the fire burn itself out so to speak?
- dan-robertson 3y agoI thought the implementations in the US were very different from those in Portugal though?
- WeylandYutani 3y agoWhen the Netherlands had a heroine junkie problem in the 80s/early 90s the solution was to accept that most of them were going to die. So the government tried to make their death reasonably comfortable. Economic fortunes turned and the nation became decadent and filthy rich again so the problem was fixed. Drug use is correlated to the economy and the happiness of the population. Portugal needs to fix unemployment and get some economic growth going.
- 3y ago
- jollofricepeas 3y agoGood point. Does anyone know how Norway has handled drugs and homelessness? The reason I ask is that we should probably compare funding and outcomes between Portugal and Norway, no? Two things are needed to change human behavior: 1. A strong deterrent 2. An equally strong support system (ie. Healthcare, housing, food, basic income) You can’t do both of these without a strong financial investment unless… You’re Singapore.
- silvestrov 3y agoYou can't compare Portugal and Norway directly as you can survive as homeless in Portugal during winter time (10°C, 50°F) but Norway is so far north that you will likely die if you don't have insulated shelter during winter. If the government in Norway don't provide shelter, it is the same as directly saying "we don't mind these people die".
- pmoriarty 3y agoYou can't be truly homeless and survive in Norway. The winters are far too cold. You will die.
- iandanforth 3y agoYep, this is fear mongering with a clear agenda.
- Vaslo 3y agoWhy do the people need to fund the garbage habit of less than 1/8 of their citizens? You choose to do drugs, you’re on your own.
- TehCorwiz 3y agoBecause the effects on society extend well beyond that 1/8th. And simply hitting and imprisoning people hasn’t worked and never works. Support, compassion, treatment work to reduce the negative externalities. Now apply what you said to the tax carve outs for billionaires and oil companies.