Is it possible the probability of success of treating the use of certain brain altering chemicals is untenably low, even if treatment was "properly" funded?
If there was a measure for success that was agreed upon, for a region, the probability of success would then be lowered to "untenably low". That isn't the case, when data collection is performed.
"Experts argue that drug policy focused on jail time is still more harmful to society than decriminalization. While the slipping results here suggest the fragility of decriminalization’s benefits, they point to how funding and encouragement into rehabilitation programs have ebbed. The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal, for instance, has sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1,150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021, the most recent year available."
It did work well. It doesn't now. What changed in between then and now is funding and commitment to getting addicts into treatment-- the founding principle of the program to begin with.
That is just one perspective from the article, not a consensus, and definitely nothing that could qualify as famous, and even then the argument is along the lines of "It was successful until we stop dumping lots of money into it."
That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.
> That reminds of how Salt Lake City recently found out the same thing with its success in curing homelessness. The problem never ends.
It's funny that you mention Salt Lake City, because that example is commonly misunderstood and actually illustrates the exact opposite of what you're pointing out.
Utah set out to solve chronic homelessness. The causes and effects of chronic homelessness are completely different from transient or episodic homelessness, and the three require different approaches. Utah eliminated 91% of chronic homelessness within ten years, using a Housing First policy. After they ended the policy, total (not chronic) homelessness increased. The majority of that increase was from non-chronic homelessness, which was not targeted by their policy and which was increasing even before that policy ended (because it was, well, independent of a policy that was... not aimed at addressing it). Chronic homelessness has increased in Utah since the end of the program in 2015, but the overwhelming majority of homelessness that's reported on in Utah is still not chronic homelessness, because chronic homelessness makes up less than 20% of the homeless population.
It's odd to look at that as "the problem never ends", because the problem (chronic homelessness), did very nearly end, until the state decided to end the program and go back to their own ways.
> 2023 report reflects a 96% increase in people experiencing chronic homelessness since 2019, but also indicates Utah is making headway in developing deeply affordable housing
>Chronic homelessness refers to people who have experienced homelessness for at least a year, either continuously or in four or more separate instances within the past three years, while also experiencing a disabling condition such as a physical disability, severe mental illness or substance use disorder.
Sounds like a good definition to me. I just don’t think it increased 96% in four years. It’s much more likely that they were cooking the numbers the previous years and had to come clean eventually.
> I just don’t think it increased 96% in four years. It’s much more likely that they were cooking the numbers the previous years and had to come clean eventually.
It's quite a leap of logic to look at an increase in chronic homelessness after ending a program that empirically reduced chronic homelessness using a straightforward mechanism, and conclude that the most probable explanation is "outright fraud, necessitating a decade-long conspiracy involving many people and organizations with opposing goals collaborating with each other, and which somehow has resulted in zero tangible evidence of the conspiracy surfacing even years after the alleged conspiracy fell apart".
"It was successful until we stop dumping lots of money into it."
Generally, successful public programs often stop being successful when they stop recieving funding. That is a fact. The resources used to pay for the portugal program were redirected from enforcement. Perusing the wikipedia page, the stats seemed a lot more encouraging than any similar ones I've seen from a country with war-on-drugs type policies, but I'm not an expert.
> Not everything scales well. Sometimes you just have to spend to fix.
I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled? Those asks cannot coexist: if drug abuse is costing society billions or trillions of dollars in resources to fix, why do we allow it in the first place?
> The money is more important than people being rehabilitated?
I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes. Eventually, they have to take responsibility for their own choices, especially if we have allowed that choice (if you think drug crime is victimless so shouldn't be punished is true).
> I don't get how we can be pushed to decriminalize drugs and then be asked for tremendous resources to treat the drug abuse we enabled?
> I don't understand why we have to pay for other people's mistakes.
It looks like you don't understand which part you don't actually get. While Portugal's program was being funded properly, the increase in drug usage was no different from nearby countries that did not change their drug laws. Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time. But what about the cost? Well, it seems to have saved a boatload of money on enforcement.
“The most important direct effect was a reduction in the use of criminal justice resources targeted at vulnerable drug users,” says Alex Stevens, professor of criminal justice at the U.K.’s University of Kent, who co-authored the study. “Before, a large number of people were being arrested and punished for drug use alone. They saved themselves a lot of money and stopped inflicting so much harm on people through the criminal justice system. There were other trends since drugs were decriminalized in 2001, but they are less easy to attribute directly to decriminalization.”
The hippies over at Forbes seem to think that ending canabis prohibition will help the US recover economically from the pandemic like ending alcohol prohibition helped end the great depression.
But what about the collateral damage of all this rampant treating-instead-of-imprisoning-people-for-drug-use? Well, The International Journal of Drug Policy said:
"Taking into consideration health and non-health related costs, we find that that the social cost of drugs decreased by 12% in the five years following the NSFAD's approval and by a rather significant 18% in the eleven-year period following its approval. Whilst the reduction of legal system costs (possibly associated with the decriminalization of drug consumption) is clearly one of the main explanatory factors, it is not the only one. In particular, the rather significant reduction of health-related costs has also played an important role."
Surely the stalwart right-wing CATO institute will set the record straight on the fallout from such an irresponsible policy:
"While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to skyrocket in many EU states, those problems—in virtually every relevant category—have been either contained or measurably improved within Portugal since 2001. In certain key demographic segments, drug usage has decreased in absolute terms in the decriminalization framework, even as usage across the EU continues to increase, including in those states that continue to take the hardest line in criminalizing drug possession and usage."
> Teen marijuana usage was 1/3 what it was in the US at the time.
Marijuana isn't illegal in the US anymore (at least where I live). Fentanyl, which is basically laced into all hard drugs these days, I guess you could argue that they are going to be dead in one or two years anyways? I guess that's tough love for you.
Hey, marijuana should be legal...and here in Washington state at least it is. The biggest problem with marijuana, due to dumb federal rules, is that the (non-marijuana) drug addicts are more likely to do armed robberies of dispensaries because they are cash only businesses.
But let's not bait and switch here: "marijuana has been shown to be manageable, so let's allow people to do all the fentanyl they want" is not very logical. A lot of teens are just dying on their first experience with fent (or something they got that had fent in it that they didn't know about!). These aren't the same things at all.
You're picking at a razor thin slice of the premise while entirely ignoring the context. It doesn't matter which drug does what. In the time period that they were properly funding treatment as a replacement for the immense expenditure on drug law enforcement for users— so not within the post decade— drug use and all of the social ills that come with it were reduced, in some cases dramatically, compared to the rest of Europe, and the rest of Europe was doing great compared to the US. The US criminalization of drug use is a fantastically expensive moral crusade that imparts misery upon people with addiction for absolutely no benefit. Portugal maintained stiff penalties for people in the black market drug business, as they should have, but simply treated the users instead of jailing them. If you have some kind of actual data showing that fentanyl, carfentanil, et al users are affected by policy differently than all other criminals or even motivated by punishment dramatically more than all other addicts, then bring it.
The interesting metric would be the percentage of addicts that were treated and went on to be “productive” or at least not using for at least x, y, and z years, and probabilities of relapse.
No, I have not seen related statistics. I need the statistic because I do not see any other way to evaluate whether or not treatment is cost effective.
I have reached a conclusion that in order to evaluate the “success” of Portugal’s policies and how they can translate to other places, then I would like to know what kind of addictions it succeeded for and for what proportion of people and for which addictions.
A lot of countries have given up on curing addiction. Finland, for example, just gives homeless addicts housing with a social worker supervising, with the idea that their behavior will continue but giving them housing is cheaper than the public services they would consume otherwise. Success isn't necessarily quantified in how much addiction is cured. A lot of chronic drug addiction cases are simply written off (they will never be productive again).
I went to Portugal during this supposed 'golden' era and it was just as depressing then as Portland is now. I have no idea how anyone can say it was a success. The despair on the street was palpable.
