This policy should make sense to anyone who has ever had any involvement with someone with an addiction. Generally the addiction is a symptom of other problems, often mental illness, that if treated appropriately would help prevent a slide back into addiction.
I would be interested to see a comparison of the total cost of this policy contrasted against, for example, the US style. Certainly I would expect the initial outlay to be greater in the Portuguese style system but as it gets people out of the system for good the lifetime cost should be lower. While I don't like to have everything measured with a monetary cost, social and moral duties are important, it would make it an easier sell to law makers and their constituents.
If you talk to an economist, they'll find a way to put monetary values on "social and moral duties"; there are all sorts of tricks for teasing them out. Money is just a score, a way of measuring and quantifying things (and of course, if you're not measuring, it's not science, in so far as social science is ever science).
I can't imagine the US style being cheaper in the short term either. You have to look at everything the "war on drugs" implies and all those costs. Stopping people from using things that naturally grow in the ground is insanely expensive.
> That fewer young people are trying drugs in Portugal may be the case (“Radical drug law could be imported to Britain”, April 22). But this simply reflects a Europe-wide trend, nowhere more evident than in the United Kingdom. The alarming Europe-wide increase in young people’s illicit drug use between 1995 and 2003 has come to a halt and is decreasing — in Portugal by rather less than the European average.
Now I'm fairly skeptical of any article of this sort written by someone from an organization who has "oppose legalization of drugs" as one of their principles, but I've checked some of their facts against the UNODC World Drug Report and they seem sound. Now either I'm missing something, or the UNODC report is wrong, or there's something else not being taken into account. Can anyone shed some light?
Not really surprising. Rehabilitation and re-socialization are common for treatment of other criminals in Europe too. It makes much more sense than "getting revenge" by locking people up to "punish them", especially if the crime they committed is largely victim-less (in case of drug abuse its the offender who is actually the victim at the same time).
Why should drug users even have to be forced to take medical 'treatment' if they have not otherwise committed any other crimes.
The problem with rehabilitation is that it places people at the mercy of subjective assessment for unlimited time. In the case of prison at least there is a definite term, but those undergoing rehabilitation may never be released (they may simply never be deemed 'cured').
But note that we are talking about an otherwise victimless crime here.
Doing illegal drugs may be victimless, but I can pretty much guarantee that an addict has at committed other crime to support their habit (like theft or prostitution).
Furthermore, study the organizations that supply the drugs (Hell's Angels for instance), and consider the amount of crime they perpetrate, directly related to the drug trade. For instance, murder (turf war), theft, various building code violations (grow ops are typically fire hazards), etc.
Bottom line, it takes a lot of crime to support a single addict.
There are millions of prescription drug abusers living in upper middle class suburbs; are they overwhelmingly guilty of prostitution and supporting a crime infrastructure too?
Imagine you were offered the options of either going to jail or being committed in a mental hospital for the crime of... consuming alcohol (back during the Prohibition).
Treatment here in Portugal is not in a mental institution.
I personally visited people recovering from heroine addiction, and it's basically a big house in a rural area in the outskirts of the city where they live, work (they grow their own vegetables, cook, clean, etc) and have therapy sessions.
More importantly, you can leave whenever you want - the place isn't closed down. You can just open the gate and walk out.
The problem with exuberant cries--otherwise gratifyingly progressive--to import this tactic into the US is the implication that such policies can be transplanted hermetically, in an acontextual (and perhaps ahistorical) way.
The feasibility of successfully recasting habitual hard drug use as a medical problem would, in reality, depend on a huge constellation of other independent features of socioeconomic policy and culture. I think these features are not present here as they are there, or in the necessary proportion.
For one, without a government healthcare sector and universal coverage, a question will immediately arise in the US that does not arise quite so readily or with such urgency in Portugal: "Who is going to pay for these addicts' treatment?"
I think that's just one example. There are many other things about the somewhat more raw and brutal existence in America as a mentally ill--or otherwise chronically ill--person that might yield unsuccessful, or at least orthogonal results.
Definitively. These places (I know on of them) have almost no expenses with personnel; the people interned there do all the work - including growing vegetables for food, although they obviously get other kind of food from outside - and there are no guards or anything like that.
I would be interested to see a comparison of the total cost of this policy contrasted against, for example, the US style. Certainly I would expect the initial outlay to be greater in the Portuguese style system but as it gets people out of the system for good the lifetime cost should be lower. While I don't like to have everything measured with a monetary cost, social and moral duties are important, it would make it an easier sell to law makers and their constituents.