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"based on the successful policy in Portugal" How are you defining successful? The linked article links to a recent wapo article from last week "Once hailed for

"based on the successful policy in Portugal" 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.)

inferiorhuman 3y ago
Beyond the headline Portugal is having doubts because they decided to gut funding. Where it was seen as promising or successful, now it's basically decriminalized drug use and no treatment or enforcement. Which kinda sounds like what Oregon is doing now and what Reagan did with mental health care in California.
- nelox 3y ago
  In addition, the policy in Portugal was to radically increase funding for community health and other programs as well as decriminalize drugs. I’m not sure that has been replicated in Oregon or San Francisco.
- username332211 3y ago
  Could you (or anyone else reading this) define "gut funding" in quantitative terms? 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.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Sure. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-cuts-nhs-funding-260519 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-cuts-nhs... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9722661/David-Cameron-ordered-to-stop-saying-NHS-spending-is-up.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9722661/David-Came... https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-cameron-set-to-break-promise-on-nhs-cuts 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.
    - swores 3y ago
      Good links thanks, and I'll add: the % of NHS's budget being pushed to private providers has been steadily increasing every year for over a decade. If you have £x to pay nurses (or CT scanning machine operating costs, or cleaning crews, or...) and nurses typical pay is £y, and your budget goes up to £2x but you also switch to using agency nurses who charge £3y while paying the nurses £1.5y, the nurses have had a 50% pay rise, but the NHS budget is effectively worth 2/3rds what it was before despite being technically double. 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!
  - chrisbolt 3y ago
    From the Washington Post article: > 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lambdasquirrel 3y ago
I live right across the border from Vancouver BC. Whatever they're doing to solve the addiction problem isn't working terribly well either. There's lots of places in the PNW that look downright utopian from a distance, but when you go and live hereabouts, only then do you see the problems. Portland is getting the flak here and everyone knows about SF because it's the worst by long shot, but even in smaller towns on both sides of the border, there are problems. 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 is radically individualistic, and yet, personal accountability has broadly flipped on its head. The folks who have chosen addiction and homelessness over getting clean / sanity / whatever are really just the tip of the iceberg.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
Unfortunately, what you are describing is incredibly common. Issue A gets some funding to try a New Approach because nothing else has worked. New Approach sees some positive results. New Approach gets some more funding. People working on New Approach say hey to scale this effectively we will need significantly more funding. They receive some funding or no funding. New Approach continues to work to some extent, but without additional funding is not scalable. 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.
- endominus 3y ago
  On the other hand, it is extremely difficult for an outside observer, looking at the results of the New Approach, to judge whether it is not scaling well because of a lack of funding or because it fundamentally does not scale well. It can also be challenging for the people involved to realize that their approach isn't working (cf. "sunk cost fallacy", "it is difficult to get a man to understand a point when his salary depends on him not understanding it", "confirmation bias"). Often, the approaches are not necessarily poorly funded but rather inefficiently managed - education and healthcare would be the prime examples in the US context. The US spends a roughly approximate amount of its public budget on healthcare as the UK does. At other times, advocates for an approach to solving a social issue are ideologically motivated more than results-oriented. A case in point is the difference between LA's approach to the homelessness crisis and NYC's take (https://public.substack.com/p/three-times-more-homeless-die-under?s=r https://public.substack.com/p/three-times-more-homeless-die-...)

inferiorhuman 3y ago

Beyond the headline Portugal is having doubts because they decided to gut funding. Where it was seen as promising or successful, now it's basically decriminalized drug use and no treatment or enforcement. Which kinda sounds like what Oregon is doing now and what Reagan did with mental health care in California.

nelox 3y ago
In addition, the policy in Portugal was to radically increase funding for community health and other programs as well as decriminalize drugs. I’m not sure that has been replicated in Oregon or San Francisco.
username332211 3y ago
Could you (or anyone else reading this) define "gut funding" in quantitative terms? 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.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Sure. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-cuts-nhs-funding-260519 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-cuts-nhs... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9722661/David-Cameron-ordered-to-stop-saying-NHS-spending-is-up.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9722661/David-Came... https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-cameron-set-to-break-promise-on-nhs-cuts 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.
  - swores 3y ago
    Good links thanks, and I'll add: the % of NHS's budget being pushed to private providers has been steadily increasing every year for over a decade. If you have £x to pay nurses (or CT scanning machine operating costs, or cleaning crews, or...) and nurses typical pay is £y, and your budget goes up to £2x but you also switch to using agency nurses who charge £3y while paying the nurses £1.5y, the nurses have had a 50% pay rise, but the NHS budget is effectively worth 2/3rds what it was before despite being technically double. 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!
- chrisbolt 3y ago
  From the Washington Post article: > 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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

lambdasquirrel 3y ago

I live right across the border from Vancouver BC. Whatever they're doing to solve the addiction problem isn't working terribly well either. There's lots of places in the PNW that look downright utopian from a distance, but when you go and live hereabouts, only then do you see the problems. Portland is getting the flak here and everyone knows about SF because it's the worst by long shot, but even in smaller towns on both sides of the border, there are problems. 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 is radically individualistic, and yet, personal accountability has broadly flipped on its head. The folks who have chosen addiction and homelessness over getting clean / sanity / whatever are really just the tip of the iceberg.

AlwaysRock 3y ago

Unfortunately, what you are describing is incredibly common. Issue A gets some funding to try a New Approach because nothing else has worked. New Approach sees some positive results. New Approach gets some more funding. People working on New Approach say hey to scale this effectively we will need significantly more funding. They receive some funding or no funding. New Approach continues to work to some extent, but without additional funding is not scalable. 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.

endominus 3y ago
On the other hand, it is extremely difficult for an outside observer, looking at the results of the New Approach, to judge whether it is not scaling well because of a lack of funding or because it fundamentally does not scale well. It can also be challenging for the people involved to realize that their approach isn't working (cf. "sunk cost fallacy", "it is difficult to get a man to understand a point when his salary depends on him not understanding it", "confirmation bias"). Often, the approaches are not necessarily poorly funded but rather inefficiently managed - education and healthcare would be the prime examples in the US context. The US spends a roughly approximate amount of its public budget on healthcare as the UK does. At other times, advocates for an approach to solving a social issue are ideologically motivated more than results-oriented. A case in point is the difference between LA's approach to the homelessness crisis and NYC's take (https://public.substack.com/p/three-times-more-homeless-die-under?s=r https://public.substack.com/p/three-times-more-homeless-die-...)