For a proper understanding of drugs policy in Portugal, read this

I've complained for years that praise for the Portuguese drugs policy has always seemed simplistic and overblown, especially when coming from libertarians. 

Well, I've found a paper (.pdf available here) from a credible sounding source that supports my take on this, and explains why so many of the claims about the Portuguese reform do not reflect the full story.

Here's the abstract:

 In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the acquisition, possession, and use of small
quantities of all psychoactive drugs. The significance of this legislation has been misunderstood. Decriminalization did not trigger dramatic changes in drug-related behavior because, as an analysis of Portugal’s predecriminalization laws and practices reveals, the reforms were more modest than suggested by the media attention they received. Portugal illustrates the shortcomings of before-and-after analysis because, as is often the case, the de jure legal change largely codified de facto practices. In the years before the law’s passage, less than 1 percent of those incarcerated for a drug offense had been convicted of use. Surprisingly, the change in law regarding use appears associated with a marked reduction in drug trafficker sanctioning. While the number of arrests for trafficking changed little, the number of individuals convicted and imprisoned for trafficking since 2001 has fallen nearly 50 percent.  

One key point is that even before the drug reform, it was not as if they were jailing huge numbers of drug users in that country:

In 2000, for example, the year before the decriminalization law went into effect, there were only twenty-five individuals in prison for crimes involving drug use. Another 121 individuals, roughly 3 percent of the incarcerated drug offender population, had traffic-consumption convictions. In other words, before decriminalization, the courts could, but rarely did, impose prison sentences on convicted drug users; after passage of the Decriminalization Act, incarceration was no longer an option.18

The paper, near the end, notes this (my bold): 

Despite the Cato Institute’s celebration of Portugal’s drug reforms, the reforms were not a move toward liberty, but a shift from one arena of government involvement to another. Portugal’s Decriminalization Act is not based on a principle of an individual’s right to consume drugs free from state intrusion. The Act still prohibits drug use subject to citation, and cultivation for personal use remains criminally prohibited. 

Before that, it notes the high number of people who are getting treatment for drug use (with increased drug treatment services being a key change of the reform): 

Data indicate that the number of treatment centers and number of individuals receiving treatment increased with the implementation of decriminalization, although data on the country’s financial investment pre- and postreform are not available. In 1998, the first year of data collection on drug treatment centers, 23,654 drug users received some form of drug treatment. The number rose to 29,204 in 2000, the year before implementation of the Decriminalization Act; by 2008, the total number in treatment reached 38,532 (IDT 2009).37 These numbers included both clients in day-treatment programs and individuals in opioid substitution treatment, the latter of which accounted for roughly three-quarters of the total treatment population count. Consistent with the explicit intention of the drug reforms to increase treatment availability, the number of reporting outpatient treatment centers grew from fifty-three in 1998 to seventy-nine in 2010.

It also makes the point that drug seizures have not changed much since the change in the law (well, heroin did peak in the 1990's, but cocaine and hashish seizures show no big reduced trend).  Furthermore, while the number of people incarcerated for drug offences has dropped from a late 90's peak, it is still at about the same level as the mid 1990's.   These figures suggest that there has not been any massive drop off in policing of drug laws, as drug trafficking is indeed still unlawful.   This also suggests that the funding for increased drug rehabilitation services has not come from massive savings on policing.  (This being the claimed benefit of following the Portuguese policy in Australia in this article yesterday.)

So what about the Commissions which drug users can face?   They can order that addicted drug users get treatment, but it's not as if even casual cannabis users are given a cheery "on your way" by the police:

Since 2001, the Commissions processed between 3,500 to 5,500 cases per year, and resolved 85 to 90 percent of them with provisional suspensions.21 Estimates indicate that 60 percent to 70 percent of the suspensions involved nonaddicted consumers (IDT Annual Reports, 2002–2010). As discussed previously, a concern regarding the growing population of heroin users was the primary motivation for the decriminalization initiative. Despite this impetus, in practice, most of the individuals who appeared before the Commissions have not been problem drug users. Instead, the majority of the issued citations for drug use have been to increasingly younger, nonaddicted, cannabis users. The proportion of cases involving cannabis has steadily grown, from approximately 50 percent of the cases during the Commission’s first eighteen months of operation to 76 percent of the cases in 2009 (IDT 2002; IDT 2010).22 The composition of the Commission’s caseload raises questions concerning the efficacy and efficiency of a system developed, in principle, to treat problem drug use but that, in practice, spends most of its time and resources processing nonaddicted marijuana users.

Obviously, I'm not arguing that the Portuguese policy is a disaster, and I think everyone can agree that the American system has placed way too much emphasis on incarceration in its drugs policy.

But while I suspect libertarians are sniggering (or horrified) by Jacqui Lambie trying to get up some system by which ice addicts can be ordered into rehabilitation, her proposal is not a million miles away from the Portguese system, which they have uncritically embraced time and time again.

One of the key lessons of the Portuguese system seems to be for governments to fund  serious increase in drug addiction treatment services.  How many "libertarian/small government" types do you hear pushing for that?

 

Fantastic television

Tonight's Foreign Correspondent was Tashi and the Monk, and it was extraordinarily good.

Touching, humane and beautiful in all senses, I also have no idea how it could be made with such naturalism - no one (and we are talking mainly children) ever seems aware of the camera or appears self conscious.  It looks like it was outsourced, being made by whoever Pilgrim Films is, but if this doesn't win some sort of award, I'd be very surprised.

It's the best 30 minutes of television you're likely to see all year...

Latest libertarian obsession

I'm not entirely sure why libertarians seem so enamored of the charter school idea.   I see the CIS is pushing it, as is Rupert Murdoch*, and of course Catallaxy has the CIS Youtube up which (perhaps unluckily) gives the impression from the frozen initial image that it's all about training young men to be the paramilitary libertarians of the future.   (Libertarians who got there via Starship Troopers tend to get excited by the idea of a righteous military dispensing justice throughout the universe, I reckon.)

I thought that the achievements of this movement was decidedly mixed;  it anything, I thought the initial enthusiasm for them had become somewhat  tempered.

But as I'm sure I've said before, modern education seems a field particularly prone to fadish ideas as to what works and what doesn't.   I tend to think that the silliest ideas did come from the Left side in the 70's, but have been debunked and are no longer  influential. 

I guess the libertarian/small government obsession with market competition alone makes them love the idea of charter schools just on principle, I think.  (That and a hatred of State school teachers more often than not leaning Left.)   Yet a recent story on 7.30 indicated that there is scope for very different approaches within the public school system.

I would have thought that society is better served by improving all schools via such discretion within the public system.  I doubt you need a charter school system at all. (I don't think they played any role in Finland's much lauded school system, did they?)

*  who tweets this morning:  "School choice vastly improves education, thus liberating all families and forever eliminates "victim" excuse. Only one enemy teacher unions"

Wearables and snooping

What could derail the wearables revolution? : Nature News & Comment

I can't work out whether people are going to worry about this much in the future or not.  I figure Google already knows where about a third of the global population slept last night.

Incoherent Molan

Was just listening to retired Army Major General Jim Molan talking on Radio National about the European/Syrian refugee issue.

His performance was utterly incoherent.  He's very keen on endearing himself to the Coalition government, however. 

Retire already, Part 2

Come on, Tony.  You've failed in your attempt to gain political brownie points by suggesting that Europe could, with a land and ocean connection to probably 10 or 20 times the number of refugees who were seeking to get to Australia, follow your high seas quasi piracy and bribing technique.

Still 54/46 to Labor, even with a so-so leader.

Just retire.

Retire already

I see that Thomas Sowell, the black conservative/libertarian economist, has another book out.  He's 85, which is well into the danger zone where public intellectuals are usually best advised to just stop talking, but actually it sounds like he's been pretty foolish for quite a long time:

It’s a funny line—and an instance of what sets Mr. Sowell apart: candor and independence of mind. No one can suggest that he doesn’t say what he thinks. In 1987, while testifying in favor of Judge Robert Bork’s ill-fated nomination to the Supreme Court, he told Joe Biden, a senator at the time, that he wouldn’t have a problem with literacy tests for voting or with $1.50 poll taxes, so long as they were evenly and fairly applied. When I ask whether he remembers this exchange, Mr. Sowell quips, “No, Joe Biden is forgettable.”

In our interview he maintains that the 1964 Civil Rights Act should have stuck to desegregating buses and government services, and let market forces take care of integrating lunch counters. Mr. Sowell says that the precedent set by imposing integration on people like Lester Maddox, a segregationist governor of Georgia who also owned a chicken restaurant, has opened a Pandora’s box. “If you say that Lester Maddox has to serve his chicken to blacks, you’re saying that the Boy Scouts have to have gay scout masters. You’re saying—ultimately—that the Catholic Church has to perform same-sex marriages.”

She drives (some) men nuts

I don't know that it was a good idea having Rosie Batty Australian of the Year, and certainly I have sometimes found her hard to "read" in the few TV appearances on which I have seen her.   But then, so did the public with Lindy Chamberlain, and she paid for that with an unwarranted jail term.  Following that terrible incident, I would have thought that sensible people should take the lesson that, for people who have gone through the horror of a child lost through murder or violence,  it never pays to think you understand them from a handful of media appearances.

Having said that, it is clear that she drives some on the Right absolutely nuts.

I cannot see the offensiveness of the on-line survey she promoted for Father's Day.  What I can see is the repetition of offensive, defamatory and ill founded slurring of the woman that has been commonplace at that blog since her son's death. 

An industry by Royal decree

King of Couture: How Louis XIV Invented Fashion as We Know It - The Atlantic

Even though caring little about fashion, this article about how the Sun King pretty much invented it for France (and the world) is interesting.  Here are a couple of key bits:

When Louis came to the throne in 1643, the fashion capital of the world
wasn’t Paris, but Madrid. Taste tends to follow power, and for the past
two centuries or so Spain had been enjoying its Golden Age, amassing a
vast global empire that fueled a booming domestic economy. Spanish style
was tight and rigid—both physically and figuratively—and predominantly
black. Not only was black considered to be sober and dignified by the
staunchly Catholic Habsburg monarchy, but high-quality black dye was
extremely expensive, and the Spanish flaunted their wealth by using as
much of it as possible. They advertised their imperial ambitions, as
well, for Spain imported logwood—a key dyestuff—from its colonies in
modern-day Mexico. While Spain’s explorers and armies conquered the New
World, her fashions conquered the old one, and Spanish style was adopted
at courts throughout Europe...

Now, how Louis changed this:

Luxury was Louis’s New Deal: The furniture, textile, clothing, and
jewelry industries he established not only provided jobs for his
subjects, but made France the world’s leader in taste and technology.
His shrewd finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, famously said that
“fashions were to France what the mines of Peru were to Spain”—in other
words, the source of an extremely lucrative domestic and export
commodity. Louis’s reign saw about one-third of Parisian wage earners
gain employment in the clothing and textile trades; Colbert organized
these workers into highly specialized and strictly regulated
professional guilds, ensuring quality control and helping them compete
against foreign imports while effectively preventing them from competing
with each other. Nothing that could be made in France was allowed to be
imported; Louis once ordered his own son to burn his coat because it
was made of foreign cloth. It was an unbeatable economic stimulus plan.

As he waged a never-ending series of expensive wars across Europe, the
French luxury goods industry replenished his war chest and enhanced the
king’s reputation at home and abroad. Louis transformed Versailles—a
dilapidated royal hunting lodge buried in the countryside 12 miles from
Paris—into a showplace for the best of French culture and industry; not
just fashion but art, music, theater, landscape gardening, and cuisine. A
strict code of court dress and etiquette ensured a steady market for
French-made clothing and jewelry. Louis has been accused of trying to
control his nobles by forcing them to bankrupt themselves on French
fashions, but, in fact, he often underwrote these expenses, believing
that luxury was necessary not only to the economic health of the country
but to the prestige and very survival of the monarchy. 

Double down

BBC - Future - The disturbing consequences of seeing your doppelganger

A good read here, relevant to the matter of out-of-body experiences, as well as perception generally.

One of the lengthier stories told also has a "message from the dead" paranormal element too, although the message was a pretty routine one, as far as these things go.  

An interesting disorder

Depersonalisation disorder: the condition you’ve never heard of that affects millions | Society | The Guardian

I haven't heard of it before, but I also wonder whether publicising it may help it spread.  (I am reminded of the Mind Hacks post about the glass body delusion that was once "popular" centuries ago, but no longer is.  I wonder if depersonalisation disorder - while not a delusion as such, I guess - can be contributed to by modern loss of faith in the soul.  The idea that we are all essentially robots for whom consciousness is an illusion would seem to me to be a good precursor to developing  "a sense of complete detachment, a life lived as an automaton or on autopilot, characterised by an absence of emotions, either good or bad.")

I never thought much of him from the start

Alex Gibney's 'The Man in the Machine': Is it Time to Rethink Steve Jobs? - The Atlantic

This may sound silly, but I resist buying into the world of Apple for two reasons:  the way they retain complete control of what's going on under the hood, so to speak; and the disdain with which I view Steve Jobs.

Happy Father's Day (ha!)

Wealthy sperm donor fears contact from more than two dozen offspring

Degree of sympathy I have for this man - approaching zero.

Yet more about "What? Our base are nuts?"

The GOP's Problem Is Not Donald Trump | Mother Jones

It's very hard to feel sorry for those Republicans (and Right wing journalists) who are shocked at the continuing popularity of Trump, when they did nothing for years to tell their nutty base that they are nuts.

As David Corn says, it's not as if the evidence for the nuttiness has been hidden:

Republicans are pissed off. (In polls, they express far more dissatisfaction with the nation's present course than Democrats.) And they believe the nation has been hijacked by President Barack Obama, whose legitimacy most Rs still reject. A recent Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus participants found that 35 percent of Republicans
believe Obama was not born in the United States. A quarter said they were not sure. (Nine out of ten Democrats said the president was born in the United States.) So nearly 60 percent of Rs believe there is cause to suspect Obama has hornswoggled the nation. Meanwhile, according to
another poll, 54 percent of Republican voters say Obama is a Muslim. A third were not
sure. Only 14 percent identified the president as a Christian.


These findings—which echo a long string of surveys conducted during the Obama years—would seem to indicate that at least half of the GOP is unhinged and living in its own fact-free and perhaps Fox-fed reality. To top it off, many Republican voters have expected the GOPers in control of Congress to kill Obamacare, shut down the government and slash the
budget, prevent Obama from issuing executive orders, and impeach the pretender who inhabits the White House. Oh, and there's this: Benghazi! So they are mighty ticked off and seriously disappointed. The Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll found that half of GOP caucus-goers said they were unsatisfied with the US government and 38 percent were "mad as hell" at it. Slightly more than half were unsatisfied with Republicans in Congress; a fifth were mad as hell at them.

 

More black hole speculation

New law implies thermodynamic time runs backwards inside black holes

Maybe all black holes feed back into the big bang?  That's just my speculation: not sure if this article supports it. But it's an idea that appeals, no?