4 ms·

>Drug problems are solved by better access to quality health care and not punitive policing Really? Can you point anywhere where drug problems are "solved"? P

>Drug problems are solved by better access to quality health care and not punitive policing Really? Can you point anywhere where drug problems are "solved"? Portugal used to be the poster child for this, but opinion is shifting because it hasn't solved anything[0]. We are trying the same in Canada, with similarly mediocre results. [0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-dru...

dundarious 3y ago
Portugal is not a wealthy country and one of the areas where funding has dropped significantly below adequate levels is the support infrastructure around decriminalization. As with all austerity politics, there are loud reactionary voices who prefer the punitive approach.
- rayiner 3y ago
  Drugs is a solved problem in most Asian countries that are much poorer than Portugal.
  - dundarious 3y ago
    Did the Duterte approach "work" in an unambiguous and uncontroversial way? Many such examples exist to dismiss your glib point.
  - arroz 3y ago
    It’s not a solved problem. It’s a nonexistent problem. You can’t solve a problem you don’t have.
mirashii 3y ago
From the article you linked: > João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding. > Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.” The story turns out to be much the same as a common trope for those who wish to undo successful policies here in the US: under-fund them as sabotage, and then call them failed when the lack of funding causes lower efficacy. Additionally, prohibitionist policies and the policing drug use has been rising (see 24,25,26 at https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13011-021-00394-7 https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...) over the second half of the time drugs have been decriminalized, so the rollbacks in societal gains need to be taken with a grain of salt.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  So it's not solved? Perpetually spending more and more money is not a solution. I'm also not surprised to see the architect blame funding as opposed to admitting their policy failed. Again, we are trying to do the same in Canada, and while overdoses are decreasing, these policies are not solving the crisis. In some places they are making it worse.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    > Perpetually spending more and more money is not a solution. That's how running a society works. The criminalize and lockup method isn't free of cost Are you expecting biological addiction to be like breeded out of the gene pool? How would a $0 cost solution eventually happen?
    - happytiger 3y ago
      I feel like many of these solutions are fueled first by ideology, and only then by the evidence. On the right, people criticize and blame the users, rant about personal responsibility, and try to lock drug users and the mentally ill up and throw away the keys. This is failed policy. On the left, people invest in legalization and treatment as a personal ideology and don’t seem to be willing to admit when their policies fail. It almost seems like a failed policy conflates to some kind of personal failure that cannot be examined or criticized. And instead of policy failure, it’s always a funding issue, no matter how many times consistent results emerge. This is looking more and more like failed policy too. I’ve seen it in Van, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle, San Francisco and LA, and it’s pretty consistently not only not getting better but getting much worse. Ultimately, neither approach seems to be working very well. And in the meantime people are living lives of hopelessness and despair in tremendously awful conditions. Are there no other options available than these two counter positions? I think we should be having more of an open dialogue about how to solve the problem and be more ready to examine the evidence, even when it doesn’t support our positions, for the greater good of those suffering, and I often see conversations on the topic break down into the tit for tat I’m seeing here. These kinds of conversations are the default, and solve nothing.
kristopolous 3y ago
That's a matter of definition. In Los Angeles I can easily find needles in the streets and large encampments of people on drugs. In say Tokyo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, I cannot. The money and resources we're throwing at the problem is being ineffectively allocated and structured because we're spending more and it's doing less. By solved here I mean if we spend billions on a problem we shouldn't be getting increasingly large sprawling encampments as a result. Even poorer cities with plenty of problems of their own like Mexico City and Bangkok had nothing like the issues I've seen on the streets of our wealthiest cities such as San Francisco. The problem is statecraft based on ideologies which don't consider efficacy as a core value Here's an example, in San Francisco there's a homeless RV park where the city is spending $140,000/year per space https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-crisis-rv-site-high-costs-18404155.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-crisis-rv... We could simply give people proper housing at a small fraction of that cost but there's a deep ideological commitment to it being "unearned" and because of these cultural ideologies we end up with the worst solutions at the highest prices. These myths of rugged individualism, isolated self improvement, the race to the bottom idea of equality, one of the only political groups that really calls horseshit on that is the left.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Just handing out housing doesn't solve the problems that lead to homelessness except in a very small minority of cases, which are also the cases most likely to resolve with less drastic interventions by giving hand ups.
  - jitl 3y ago
    handing out housing does actually solve homelessness. Once the unhoused have house, they are no longer unhoused.

dundarious 3y ago

Portugal is not a wealthy country and one of the areas where funding has dropped significantly below adequate levels is the support infrastructure around decriminalization. As with all austerity politics, there are loud reactionary voices who prefer the punitive approach.

rayiner 3y ago
Drugs is a solved problem in most Asian countries that are much poorer than Portugal.
- dundarious 3y ago
  Did the Duterte approach "work" in an unambiguous and uncontroversial way? Many such examples exist to dismiss your glib point.
- arroz 3y ago
  It’s not a solved problem. It’s a nonexistent problem. You can’t solve a problem you don’t have.

mirashii 3y ago

From the article you linked: > João Goulão — head of Portugal’s national institute on drug use and the architect of decriminalization — admitted to the local press in December that “what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding. > Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.” The story turns out to be much the same as a common trope for those who wish to undo successful policies here in the US: under-fund them as sabotage, and then call them failed when the lack of funding causes lower efficacy. Additionally, prohibitionist policies and the policing drug use has been rising (see 24,25,26 at https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13011-021-00394-7 https://substanceabusepolicy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1...) over the second half of the time drugs have been decriminalized, so the rollbacks in societal gains need to be taken with a grain of salt.

itsoktocry 3y ago
So it's not solved? Perpetually spending more and more money is not a solution. I'm also not surprised to see the architect blame funding as opposed to admitting their policy failed. Again, we are trying to do the same in Canada, and while overdoses are decreasing, these policies are not solving the crisis. In some places they are making it worse.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  > Perpetually spending more and more money is not a solution. That's how running a society works. The criminalize and lockup method isn't free of cost Are you expecting biological addiction to be like breeded out of the gene pool? How would a $0 cost solution eventually happen?
  - happytiger 3y ago
    I feel like many of these solutions are fueled first by ideology, and only then by the evidence. On the right, people criticize and blame the users, rant about personal responsibility, and try to lock drug users and the mentally ill up and throw away the keys. This is failed policy. On the left, people invest in legalization and treatment as a personal ideology and don’t seem to be willing to admit when their policies fail. It almost seems like a failed policy conflates to some kind of personal failure that cannot be examined or criticized. And instead of policy failure, it’s always a funding issue, no matter how many times consistent results emerge. This is looking more and more like failed policy too. I’ve seen it in Van, Portland, Sacramento, Seattle, San Francisco and LA, and it’s pretty consistently not only not getting better but getting much worse. Ultimately, neither approach seems to be working very well. And in the meantime people are living lives of hopelessness and despair in tremendously awful conditions. Are there no other options available than these two counter positions? I think we should be having more of an open dialogue about how to solve the problem and be more ready to examine the evidence, even when it doesn’t support our positions, for the greater good of those suffering, and I often see conversations on the topic break down into the tit for tat I’m seeing here. These kinds of conversations are the default, and solve nothing.

kristopolous 3y ago

That's a matter of definition. In Los Angeles I can easily find needles in the streets and large encampments of people on drugs. In say Tokyo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, I cannot. The money and resources we're throwing at the problem is being ineffectively allocated and structured because we're spending more and it's doing less. By solved here I mean if we spend billions on a problem we shouldn't be getting increasingly large sprawling encampments as a result. Even poorer cities with plenty of problems of their own like Mexico City and Bangkok had nothing like the issues I've seen on the streets of our wealthiest cities such as San Francisco. The problem is statecraft based on ideologies which don't consider efficacy as a core value Here's an example, in San Francisco there's a homeless RV park where the city is spending $140,000/year per space https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-crisis-rv-site-high-costs-18404155.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-homeless-crisis-rv... We could simply give people proper housing at a small fraction of that cost but there's a deep ideological commitment to it being "unearned" and because of these cultural ideologies we end up with the worst solutions at the highest prices. These myths of rugged individualism, isolated self improvement, the race to the bottom idea of equality, one of the only political groups that really calls horseshit on that is the left.

Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Just handing out housing doesn't solve the problems that lead to homelessness except in a very small minority of cases, which are also the cases most likely to resolve with less drastic interventions by giving hand ups.
- jitl 3y ago
  handing out housing does actually solve homelessness. Once the unhoused have house, they are no longer unhoused.