[bnralt]

> You heard it was good.. you didn't believe it and then an article came from somewhere saying the opposite and you believed it.

I heard it was good and red articles saying as such and naively supported it. Then the results in my own city were nothing like what we were told - crime increased, number of addicts increased, tent cities and open air drug markets spread all over the place. When reality didn’t match my assumptions, I went back and revisited my assumptions.

A lot of this was I no longer relied on articles from sources I had earlier trusted, and instead started going to primary sources. I found that the anti-drug efforts in Portugal were nothing like they were presented in the U.S. They were pretty far from mere decriminalization, and included a good deal of state coercion to try to force addicts into treatment.

This lead me not only to realize my assumptions were wrong, but that the people who I had previously thought were writing well informed evidence based articles were actually cherry-picking data to try to push their preferred policy. The fact that decriminalization hasn’t gone the way we were told it would, and most of these people have made no effort to revisit their assumptions (only saying that they must still be right and that it must be someone else’s fault), is a pretty good demonstration that they’re not basing they’re beliefs on actual evidence.

[Kim_Bruning]

The Netherlands also decriminalizes drugs to an extent, but -just like in Portugal- that is part of a larger plan to keep drugs and drug addicts under control. It just so happens that merely treating drug addicts as criminals doesn't give you all that much control, hence. Letting go of control entirely is the exact opposite of what Netherlands and Portugal have been doing.