[LawTalkingGuy]

> All drugs have long been decriminalized in Portugal

Portugal did not decriminalize use of drugs! Public use of drugs, and being uncontrollably high in public, is criminal and they use the court system to force people into voluntary rehab (the other choice is prison) where they use an evidence-based drug treatment system and up to a few years of job skills and counseling before releasing the person. Decisions are made by a panel of doctors and ex street-junkies who know the truth of the situation and what the addicted will say and do.

Portland Oregon on the other decriminalized the drugs - as in you can buy and inject anything in front of a cop and pass out in your own vomit in the middle of the sidewalk and the police can't even move you.

Regrettably they knowingly chose to reference Portugal as if they were following its advice while using the terminology to describe a completely different system.

> Actually one thing I would be curious to try is to substitute ketamine for opiates. It might work out that some people prefer it and it’s far less harmful on the body.

That feels like the joke about Freud trying to cure Cocaine addiction with Heroin and merely inventing the speedball.

What do you think of Suboxone? It blocks withdrawal symptoms and the further effect of opioids, making users not suffer or want more drugs during the process. At the end, the user is not dependent or addicted, and is ready for actual rehabilitation.

[rvcdbn]

You're probably right about the Portugal example, I don't know enough about it to know if it is the solution for sure. I was just grasping for what I could only think of as the best possible solution. Perhaps there truly is no solution.

But criminalization certainly isn't the solution. Hiding the problem in order to allow the rest of society to ignore it more easily is obviously (to me at least) less desirable than having it in the open where we are all forced to share at least some small part of the burden, the hope being that this will push us to find real solutions.

Re: ketamine - the point is that many these folks are seeking an escape from an unbearable life. In that position, there is really no desire to neuter the drug. I'm pretty sure Suboxone availability is not the issue. Ketamine on the other hand might provide a similar escape without most of the harmful side effects. It's pretty obvious that ketamine is much less harmful in every way than heroin.

[LawTalkingGuy]

> But criminalization certainly isn't the solution.

There are many ways to see criminal law - as a punishment, or as a tool.

Portugal uses it as a tool. They know, because many of the founders are ex junkies, that junkies can't say no to another dose. They have to remove the dangerous option and that's handled by taking you off the street, for which they use the crimes as an excuse to remove your autonomy temporarily. Critically, they don't stick you with a criminal record for anything self-harming - when you get clean your record is also clean.

As a parent I believe in talking to kids, explaining, making them allies. But if they misbehave dangerously you simply pick them up and carry them away. You don't pretend that a 3yo, or even an 8yo, can understand everything well enough to just the dangers in a situation so sometimes you just take control.

Given that junkies have less reasoning capability and willpower than a 3yo, I think that trying to reason with them "Oh come on, don't you want to put down the drugs and not feel awesome? Don't you want to sign up for a 'meaningful' life with a 9-5 job?" is going to work because drugs are engineered to take that ability away.

IMHO the correct response, for where we've let ourselves get on the West coast, is to take everyone who ODs and throw them in an ambulance when narcan-ing them rather than leaving them on the street. To give them suboxone when we get them to a holding facility. After a day or two of good food and TV and smokes, etc, etc, but no more hard drugs - but also no more desire for them or detox pain from not having them - you ask if they want to continue the program. The trick is that both paths lead to the program - one directly and one via a bit of a cooldown in a more traditional jail (though still super low-security) until they come to the conclusion on their own. This is where you use the criminal charges, from whatever they did to obtain those drugs, to justify the captivity.

There's a good documentary (Vancouver is Dying, I think) where one of the government guys helping people, pushing for new laws, had spent five years on the street himself as a casual habit took him to rock bottom from a high-status life, so he knows all sides of the issue, and he thanks the people and the systems that gave him the opportunity to live again. There are many such stories, but his - juxtaposed with the misery people are currently in - was heartwarming and breaking.

Opioids don't have to be a life sentence.