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.)
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.
> 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.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/david-cameron-cuts-nhs...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9722661/David-Came...
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.
The reality is that they cut the things that add cumulative pressure to the NHS itself. E.g - social care cuts meant that thousands of beds occupied by medically fit people were occupied because they had nowhere to send those people to. The "underfunded" thing is a simplistic and borderline misleading way of phrasing it but with the attention economy that we're in I can see why they'd phrase it that way
And "successful program" ?
Your UK example doesnt include the denominator -- the number of people needing care. GDP growth is not correlated to the number of people needing care, so using it to normalize spend isn't right. The %GDP needs to be going up to maintain funding levels
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.
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.
