Mihail Pautovmedic, IC Fundeni · Doctor Mihail - Medic specialist în chirurgie generală, Educator de sănătate

Politicile publice în materie de droguri se bazează mult prea puțin pe ceea ne spune știința 👨🏼‍⚕️☝🏻

9 Feb 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:09

Excerpt of a YouTube discussion (Mihail Pautov + another speaker) arguing that punitive drug policies fail and that scientific evidence favors decriminalization/harm-reduction approaches. The speakers attribute continued punitive laws to political incentives (votes, blaming drug users) and suggest commercial interests (e.g., the alcohol industry) may oppose reform.

Chapters

If you punish people at first, you think it's going to work. Yeah. You say, yeah, we're going to give you a criminal record, you're going to lose your job, you're going to lose your good life. And you think people are going to get afraid and they will not use the drug, but that's not happening. And this, here comes the science and says, look, this is not working. This is a better approach. And usually we listen to science. Right. Why do you think that politicians are not listening to science in this field?
Well, because it's politically very convenient to blame drug users. Politicians love to blame drug users.
There's a proportion.
Of the population that wants to see people punished, but politicians jump on that bandwagon because they know that drug users don't vote anyway, so they won't lose their votes, but they might get votes from the moral majority who just like to see people punished. So I, I say all the drug laws have always been politically driven. They've been driven because some politicians, some parties will get some advantage over them.
Do you think that there is commercial reasons in the background that maybe, like decriminalizing some drugs can harm other industries like alcohol industry?
Well, you're right. So what drives the politicians is not just votes.
Yeah.
But money.