We ought to decriminalize drugs, just like Portugal
July 26, 2017
I’ll just put these articles out here.
Note that we count overdose deaths per 100,000, Europe counts them per million.
Our best state in 2015, Nebraska, had 69 overdose deaths per million, or back of the pack for Europe. Portugal, with decriminalized drugs, had 3 per million.
Here’s the European stats referenced in that article.
Estonia, the European country with the highest overdose rate (127 per million) would sit at 13th among US states, tied with Georgia. 8 states (New Mexico, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Kentucky, Ohio, New Hampshire, and West Virginia) had an overdose death rate about double that in 2015.
And of course, there’s all the violence that comes from pushing drugs into the criminal economy.
Portugal did the experiment, they’re not an especially wealthy nation, and they got great results. We should study what they did and copy it exactly; we’ve never had a “War on Drugs” that came anywhere close to their results, and their approach didn’t require jail sentences, corrupted police forces, or no-knock warrants to “preserve evidence”. The humane choice is humane, AND it works.
