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Portugal’s approach is ideal.

It is also important I feel to employ primary and secondary preventions from early childhood to late adolescence. For juveniles arriving at tertiary stage prevention it is usually too late and a life of criminality seems to beckon.

Primary and secondary programs can help to prevent juvenile crime before it becomes a Juvenile problem.

Great point and have been decriminalizing drugs in California! I recalled voting several years+ ago to reduce many felonies to misdemeanors in California and quite a few prisons released these people with approximately in the 70+% were convicted of a drug related offense and should have rehabilitation. Now, this is more the case for rehab., unfortunately many state has a lot to catch up to California or for instance Portugal's methodology as noted in another post here.

I think it's a choice. Most People know going in what drugs can do to you and how they effect and ruin lives, so why would you be so stupid to try it? Do you really think you can do heroine and not get addicted to it? Drugs and alcohol for the most part are an escape for people that can't deal with reality, that's how they get addicted, but i think it just makes their lives harder. I've never done drugs, I don't drink, I made the wise choice to deal with my problems head on..people that can't cope do dope. ‍
Btw this is just my opinion..take it or leave it.

I am in recovery,(opiods were handed out like candy),
alcohol my drug. We saw it as a willpower choice
and now we know its a chemical imbalance-there gets to be
no OFF switch for addicts. We need education , not imprisionment. Yes it is stark- we prioritze punishment
as opposed to curing the sickness. Mental health at all ends
of the spectrum are underfunded and overwhelmed- we
ration these services. Some countries have little or no
alcoholism -why . I think they are more comprehensive and
less commercialized. A person can become addicted to a veriety of things , and using old methods and band aids is
not going to make progress.Science,medicine ,education
will enable humanity to realize its potential.
Thanx,good post.

When something is broken there are three options , repair it, dispose of it, or shove it in a box till later.
With addiction we can treat to fix the problem, with what seems to be limited success.
We could just decide to give each addict an overdose, let them go out on a high, the addict is probably happy for a while and the problem will slowly be reduced to a low level, but there are ethical considerations about 'life'
The current system is put them in a box (prison) and forget them for a while, which is no solution at all

Make drugs legal (which eradicates the illegal supply issues), tax the sales, use the money to fund real addiction treatment ... seems a better way forward

Apart from the fact that harm minimisation/treatment works and punishment doesn't...
Ok, a few things about addiction. My main personal experience is with opiates. Heroin was ridiculously cheap and pure in Sydney during the 90's, and I watched a whole bunch of my mates fuck their lives up for, on average, 5-10 years.
Cold turkey is fucking horrible, but it's just the beginning. Opiates screw up your normal pleasure responses, leaving everyday life flat and unengaging. That lasts for at least a year and makes kicking long term really hard.
Also, junkies disconnect from society. The only people who want to hang around with junkies are other junkies, so you end up with your whole social circle being all about junk. So if you do kick, you lose the only support network you have.
Also, opiates are very dangerous for anyone with self esteem issues. It wraps you up in a big, warm cuddle of post-orgasmic bliss, and that little voice inside your head telling you how shit you are shuts the fuck up.
For a while, anyway.
In a weird way, being a junky also provides a degree of emotional predictability, too. Junkies become very emotionally binary - scored/wasted? Good. Hanging out/trying to get on? Bad. And this security can make normal life, with its complications, responsibilities and randomness difficult to cope with.
Just my 2c.

There is addiction, then there is habit, so I hear. There is a physical and pyschological component, so I hear.

I've never done drugs, so I have no experience understanding addiction. I do have bad habits, but can spend a month breaking them with some discomfort.

When an addicted person decides to commit a crime to buy drugs rather than seek medical help...is that voluntary? Is that person making a choice to hurt some one rather than seek help?

How is the drug responsible for the moral behavior of the addicted person?

Is it a good person making an involuntary choices? How are they involuntary? What is the disease mechanism of drugs 'creating' addict behavior? Is the craving urge so great that it affects mental behavior?

Those are the questions I have...

The way most countries (including the UK and USA) is currently trying to combat drugs is very clearly not working. In Portugal, where at one time as many as 10% of the population suffered heroin addiction, has decriminalised all drugs - if you get caught with heroin or cocaine there, you don't get thrown into prison (where drugs aren't hard to come by) but are instead steered towards treatment to get you off drugs. The stats from the Portuguese method are astounding: I've long argued that decriminalisation is worth a try, but it seems to have worked even better than anyone could have expected - for example, drug-related HIV infection has fallen from 104.2 per million to 4.2, which is massive (more here: [theguardian.com].

The fact that every other country hasn't followed Portugal's lead seems utterly bizarre; one can only guess that the law-makers elsewhere are off their heads on drugs.

There are many reasons why a person becomes an addict; and, some people are genetically more prone to become addicted. Incarceration is not the answer unless other crimes are committed as well--and, even in those circumstances, the focus should be on trying to help the person rather than just locking them up. I personally think that drug use needs to be decriminalized (we all know who gets hurt most by the war on drugs); and we should focus on education, prevention, and rehabilitation.