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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

Drug use is rising in Portugal. https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/133086356/Mixed-Results-For-P... The Guardian skirts around the issue with some weasley phrasing “ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use”. Problematic according to whom? Being a high functioning addict who claims to be fine does not mean that you don’t have a serious problem that is damaging your relationships and potential.

How about the number of people living sober lives? That seems like at least as important a number.

And to what extent is the continued illegality of selling drugs in Portugal keeping people away from drugs by virtue of wanting to avoid the shady characters who sell them? It seems likely that true legalization would lead to a massive increase in usage.

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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1464837 "drug-related pathologies — such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage — have decreased dramatically. Drug policy experts attribute those positive trends to the enhanced ability of the Portuguese government to offer treatment programs to its citizens — enhancements made possible, for numerous reasons, by decriminalization." from the guardian article "Portugal has seen dramatic drops in overdoses, HIV infection and drug-related crime." Problematic according to people dieing. Isn't getting the number of people dieing and getting diseases decreasing far more important than a rise in drug use?

It's a very important goal, but if you believe that drug use itself is corrosive to the culture and prosperity of a people, you might prioritize overall drug use.

Let's take a hypothetical. Do you prefer a society where 30% have drug problems damaging themselves and their families, but there are very few overdose deaths and diseases among that 30%? Or one in which only 5% have drug problems, but there many more deaths and diseases among that 5%? I don't think there's an obviously right choice.

Ideally we can thread the needle and lower drug usage in addition to reducing the harms associated with it. That's the trillion dollar policy question and I don't think anyone has solved it yet.

I don't think that has happened here though. The drug use rate in portugal is still extremely low - 2% compared to 5-10% elsewhere in the EU

That’s a highly confounding factor too then. For whatever reason, Portugal didn’t have much of a drug culture to begin with. That makes it harder to translate any lessons to other countries that do.

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