While I do agree that prohibition is probably not the answer, calling the Portuguese policy a "success" kind of misses the forest for the trees[1]. The most obvious problem is funding (which Porto is running out of): life-long support for a drug addict is going to be significantly more expensive than throwing them in jail for a few years. Not to mention that the latter is also more popular with voters.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/once-hailed-for-decrimi...
Citation needed, you might be underestimating how much it costs to jail someone. If a drug user actually manages to get clean (which with proper support, most can) then the cost of support is basically checking up on them a couple of times a year. Meanwhile they can hold down a job and live a normal life.
That's as opposed to the significant costs of keeping someone in prison, which is significantly more than they would be earning if they were free.
It's worse than that. If someone is working a productive job, even if they don't make much, they're doing something useful. Someone has their dishes washed or their floors swept and there is a surplus that accrues not only to the worker but also the rest of society.
If someone is in prison, not only do you lose that surplus, you have to extract tax dollars from some other productive activity and use it to pay prison guards and consume real estate, which money could have been used by the government to do something useful, or to lower taxes so the taxpayer can do something useful.
Prison is an enormous net loss on both ends.
While I agree that the prison-scenario costs are probably underestimated and underappreciated... If we're going to try to measure the "doing something useful" part, we should also consider the other side of "doing something destructive to other people and property" part.
Someone could hold down a job and be cutting catalytic converters out of other people's cars.
Ah, I was assuming the drug addict (or at least a signification portion) wouldn't be getting clean. A large part of Portugal's policy is focused on safe drug use (decriminalization, clean needles, drug dispensaries, etc.).
Consider this: if drug use is criminalised, then seeking help increases your risk of getting arrested!
There are plenty of drugs in jails. Sticking someone in jail is a very expensive and unlikely to be effective way to treat their addiction.
Keep in mind that I have no idea how to "fix" this, and it's a very complicated issue, so I'm just trying to spark conversation. If we look at historical examples (e.g. opium dens), it's rarely these societal issues fixed themselves with more lenient social policies (they often, in fact, got worse).
The counter-example is Prohibition (which was an abject failure), but maybe this is (at least in part) due to the cultural importance of alcohol of so many people. I don't really think cocaine or meth are such cultural lynchpins.
Copied & pasted from Wikipedia:
"Alcohol consumption declined dramatically during Prohibition. Cirrhosis death rates for men were 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911 and 10.7 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcoholic psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. Arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct declined 50 percent between 1916 and 1922. For the population as a whole, the best estimates are that consumption of alcohol declined by 30 percent to 50 percent.[7]
Specifically, "rates for cirrhosis of the liver fell by 50 percent early in Prohibition and recovered promptly after Repeal in 1933."[4] Moore also found that contrary to popular opinion, "violent crime did not increase dramatically during Prohibition" and that organized crime "existed before and after" Prohibition.[7] The historian Jack S. Blocker Jr. stated that "Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect."[8] In addition, "once Prohibition became the law of the land, many citizens decided to obey it".[8] During the Prohibition era, rates of absenteeism decreased from 10% to 3%.[9] In Michigan, the Ford Motor Company documented "a decrease in absenteeism from 2,620 in April 1918 to 1,628 in May 1918."[6]
Opium was prohibited even after the opium wars. That's not a good example of non-prohibition but instead the knockon effects of worst of both worlds informal, capricious quasi-legality.
> The counter-example is Prohibition (which was an abject failure), but maybe this is (at least in part) due to the cultural importance of alcohol of so many people. I don't really think cocaine or meth are such cultural lynchpins.
I mean, people haven't really stopped doing Cocaine or Meth, and the most negative effects of prohibition (extremely violent organized crime) still seem to be present.
