Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id583080182
decriminalization is not to blame: the real problem is lack of state support for addiction recovery.
✏️ It’s not about banning or criminalizing or shaming an act, it’s about providing a support system around it. 🔗 View Highlight
id583080438
Stephens dismisses those who blame poor treatment funding for the “disaster.” On the contrary, he says, addiction is a “lifestyle” whose adherents refuse help. But those like Salazar who actually work in addiction treatment reject the idea that addicts don’t want help. The lack of available treatment and months-long wait times that addicts face fly in the face of the claim that treatment funding doesn’t matter because addicts don’t want it.
✏️ Backwards logic basically. Antagonists say that it’s not worth spending money on support, because addicts don’t seek it out.. but in reality addicts don’t seek it out because they see how terrible the support is. 🔗 View Highlight
id583083942
When the policy was passed, there were widespread warnings of a total catastrophe. On the contrary, “new HIV infections, drug deaths and the prison population all fell sharply within the first decade.” A 2007 report stated that “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.”
id583085395
The last decade has seen an uptick in drug deaths, in sharp contrast to the “resounding success” of the 2000s. The formerly untouchable policy is being reexamined.
✏️ Portugal’s success has been waning and reversed a bit in past decade due to a couple of factors… 🔗 View Highlight
id583085637
One culprit for the deterioration since 2020 is the COVID pandemic, which has seen a sharp rise in drug deaths across the world.
✏️ Reason one for the backslide in Portugal. 🔗 View Highlight
id583086261
the situation went from improving to deteriorating right after neoliberal austerity programs cut treatment funding and contracted out formerly state-run services to private nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
✏️ Reason two.. the cutting of treatment funding and shifting from public to private. 👓 capitalism 🔗 View Highlight
id583088427
It also set up robust harm reduction as well as treatment and recovery programs. Those in active addiction could get clean paraphernalia and medical supervision as well as methadone, which eases opioid withdrawals. Those caught with drugs are sent to dissuasion commissions, which determine if the user is addicted, and if so, recommend treatment programs. If the addict voluntarily chooses to attend treatment, the commission books it for them, and they can attend for free. After residential treatment programs, recovering addicts get job support from the government, including loans to start worker cooperatives. Portugal treated addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal one, and unlike the United States, it treated health care as a right.
✏️ What the original law helped setup in terms of support… things like clean tools, supervision and easing techniques. Also free treatment, job support, loans and worker coops. TWO very simple values to have that shift entire narratives and processes:
- It treated addiction as a health issue and not a criminal one.
- It saw health care as a right for every individual. 👓 socialism 🔗 View Highlight
id583089297
In 2012, “Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation” as “a funding drop from 76 million euros (17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups.” At the same time, the country’s Institute for Drugs and Drug Addiction was disbanded and absorbed into the National Health Service, which simultaneously had its own budget cut by 10 percent.
✏️ Elaborating on why the program failed, this feels like the standard strategy of any country that wants to kill social programs. Cut the funding severely, force them to outsource to privatization, and just weaken the overall structure. 🔗 View Highlight