>acute issues created by the hard street drugs, minimizing drug related crime and so on.
You talk about this as if its small potatoes!
These are major major issues that poison society even in richer countries like the UK. Having lived in London for half a decade and seen what a regime of prohibition has led to there - I would take the "flawed" Portuguese program.
My hat is off to Golão and I wish he could get direct funding from EU without local politics intervention. I think the impact at the time was amazing and the results are not debatable. So let me get that out of the way and agree with you in lots of things you've shared in this comment section.
My main point is I think we still have loads of mental health issues in Portugal, possibly masked by the super high rate of AD use in our population, which keeps growing. Daily dosages have more than doubled since 2009 (75 DD per 1000 people to 150 DD per 1000 people) and it's accelerating.
You talk about this as if its small potatoes!
These are major major issues that poison society even in richer countries like the UK. Having lived in London for half a decade and seen what a regime of prohibition has led to there - I would take the "flawed" Portuguese program.