Portugal treats addiction as a disease, not a crime
I&#x27;ve often thought that substance access needs to be completely deregulated, for drugs of abuse as well as other medications. This would increase access and competition among providers, and avoid rent-seeking kinds of economic problems in the health care market. It would also lead to better treatment of substance use problems, and kill cartels by decreasing their monopoly on production and distribution.<p>In doing so, you could move to a kind of competency-based system akin to what happens with people who have dementia or cognitive impairments. Basically, you&#x27;re legally entitled to buy whatever meds you want, until you&#x27;re deemed incompetent to make that decision. Processes could be set up whereby mental health professionals (psychiatrists, psychologists), ethicists, and the judicial system could make determinations that an individual is not competent to make decisions about the substance use purchasing due to addiction.<p>This might sound kind of draconian, but decisions about competency could be make pretty thorough, requiring a petition, stringent evaluation criteria involving panels and a judicial decision. It would also be dramatically less restrictive than the current system, that basically assumes everyone is incompetent to make drug-related decisions based on the specific drug.<p>It would also emphasize that the lack of competency is a health-related problem, and not a criminal problem.