No, they didn’t — we can’t build safe consumption sites in the US because of Federal law, neither city built the necessary treatment infrastructure to do “Portu

No, they didn’t — we can’t build safe consumption sites in the US because of Federal law, neither city built the necessary treatment infrastructure to do “Portugal-style” treatment, and police in these US cities seem to resent the approach and don’t take it seriously enough to achieve Portugal’s outcomes. We can’t just stop addressing drug use and not build the care and treatment infrastructure on the other end. People instinctively understand this, which is why “defund the police” failed as a slogan, but the abolitionist program was always meant to include building social infrastructure as an alternative to police. Those alternative programs in the US are always an underfunded afterthought, even in cities where they have political support. For example, I still can’t call San Francisco’s crisis intervention team directly — I have to call the cops if I see someone on the street experiencing a crisis, and they still might send a poorly trained goon with a gun to deal with it, because the crisis intervention team doesn’t operate 24/7. In other words, these policies haven’t failed, they’ve barely even been tried.