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Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

And plenty of countries without private prisons or large alcohol & tobacco companies or "slave labor" treat drugs way worse than the US.

My point isn't that "countries all treat things exactly the same". My point is that the OP's alleged reasons don't really hold up once you abandon a myopic US-centric view and actually look at other countries.

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With the exception of the ones with insane politics involving execution, dictatorships or the ones that have a harsh posture because of religious motives, I can't find a single one that has a war on drugs at the same level as the United States, can you point me to some sources about democratic countries that are worse than the United States on this specific point?

Not sure how your question is relevant to the parent’s point that US centric problems are probably not the sole cause that portugal’s policies have not been adopted, given many countries outside the US also haven’t adopted the policies.

But to your question, I would note that drug laws in Japan and South Korea are among the harshest in the world.

Most of Asia has even harsher drug laws than the US does, that includes China (you know, 1.3 billion people and the world's second largest economy). Their enforcement budgets are nowhere near as large per capita and they don't have the idiotic mandatory minimum sentencing laws that the US implemented a few decades ago (which is largely the cause of the huge prison population increase).

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