Portugal Cut Addiction Rates in Half by Connecting Users With Communities Instead of Jailing Them

[marmar]

from YES! Magazine:


Portugal Cut Addiction Rates in Half by Connecting Drug Users With Communities Instead of Jailing Them
Fifteen years ago, the Portuguese had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. So they decriminalized drugs, took money out of prisons, put it into holistic rehabilitation, and found that human connection is the antidote to addiction.


Johann Hari posted Feb 12, 2015


It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned—and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted: There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That’s what addiction means.

This theory was first established, in part, through rat experiments—ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advertisement by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The ad explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently?

.....(snip).....

This isn’t theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with one percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse.

So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them—to their own feelings, and to the wider society. ................(more)

http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/portugal-cut-drug-addiction-rates-in-half-by-connecting-users-with-communities

[hunter]

1. This is a very important observation.

Who benefits from the system we have now in the U.S.A.? Certainly not the addicts.

But Law Enforcement can seize money and obtain more impressive toys of violence.

Prisons, often private, get prisoners.

Bankers get money to launder.

Pimps get prostitutes.

And the most "innovative" gangsters, the best in the business of organized crime, political corruption, and management by violence, have drug prices supported as Law Enforcement takes out their lesser competitors.

[JayhawkSD]

2. That headline is a bit misleading.

I am not decrying the value of decriminalization; it may be a valid solution, but what the article says, in fact, is, "since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent." (emphasis mine)

So it says that addiction has fallen, but it does not say by how much, and it makes no claim that it has been cut in half. The injecting user has been cut in half, but the injecting user is the most hard core user, and to what degree have they merely turned an injecter into an inhaling addict?

Again, yes, that too would be a benefit of decriminalization, but dishonest reporting annoys me. The headline which the op quotes says they "cut addiction rates in half," and the article makes no such claim.

[woo me with science]

3. K&R

For humane policies.

For governments that serve people rather than ruling them.