Politics Corner (Part 2)

Society
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This government has not been able to make the necessary cuts, so the expenditure side cannot be brought under control, not at all. Instead, on the revenue side, for some reason, risky decisions have been made, for example, by lowering corporate taxation, and then it is somehow hoped that this will provide a sufficient level of self-financing. At the same time, projects like the one-hour train have been promoted, which have nothing to do with responsible economic policy.

The Liberal Party’s list of cuts has plenty of targets from which savings could be made. But as soon as you bring one up, there will be quite a protest even from very right-wing people on this forum.

So, unfortunately, I see no reason to praise this government or Mrs. Scissorhands.

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Here are instructions on how to fix the shortfall:

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Updated version:

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The Bible says something like, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Now this teaching has been condensed and goes: “the rich are assholes.”

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I don’t want to burden a good thread or the coffee room, but this surely fits here:

Wouldn’t there be a great risk here that a Finn would be guilty of preparing for genocide? For example, if one were to start arranging housing in Finland for children subject to forced displacement at this stage, one would continuously commit new crimes punishable by imprisonment: preparation, attempt, and execution?

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Why on earth? How would supporting the relocation of willing Palestinians to another country somehow be “genocide”? I am specifically talking about assisting those who leave voluntarily. Israel will handle the “forced displacements” however it handles them. And the fact is likely that if/when Palestinians move and/or are moved, it will happen to several different places.

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SDP 25.3%, although there are a couple of years until the elections.

It will be interesting to see how the polls perform in the next parliamentary elections. In the municipal elections, the error for PS (Finns Party) was approximately 4 percentage points. A week before the municipal elections, PS’s parliamentary support was 15.4%, and when that 4% error is subtracted, we are roughly at the current parliamentary support. This is how those correction factors evolve.

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Let’s discuss cannabis legalization or decriminalization for a moment?

In Germany, cannabis was legalized in 4/2024, and the consequences are already visible as increased psychoses, psychotic violence, mental health disorders, etc.

The story is from today’s Etelä-Suomen Sanomat, where the head of addiction medicine at Frankfurt University Hospital was interviewed. I don’t dare to quote or screenshot the whole story, but here are a couple of excerpts:

Screenshot_20250521_112940_Chrome

Screenshot_20250521_113036_Chrome

Facilitating the availability of cannabis does not lead to good things. Let’s hope that other states at least understand this.

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Here is Tommi Kangasmaa’s statement regarding Hamas’s strategy on how Israel will be destroyed.

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This would be an interesting topic, but it’s hard to find anything. Google mainly produces results from clearly politicized news sources. Or well, I don’t know, but for example, the International Cannabis Business Conference doesn’t seem very neutral. Then again, most of the perhaps more neutral news articles are such that they have no sources or are based on what someone has said in an interview.

Unfortunately, it’s a bit the same with the screenshots you attached. For example, “Cannabis use is linked to increased…” okay, but has legalization had an impact on this? “More and more people are also trying smoking,” source? Has the growth been 1%, 1000%, or what? Has there been growth before legalization? Has there been growth at the same time in neighboring countries where it hasn’t been legalized on the same schedule? I.e., has there been a change in the growth trend and how does this compare to references? Etc.

So I’m not trying to argue against it, I’m just interested in reading about the topic, but it’s hard to find decent content, which is why I’m asking. And those examples are just to illustrate what would be good content.

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Support will partly depend on how well the current government succeeds in its goals, and this currently looks very dismal.

The previous elections were approached with debt and employment issues. Regarding borrowing, the goals can already be thrown into the scrap heap, as borrowing is increasing worse than targeted.

The employment target, on the other hand, was extremely optimistic from the outset, but it is already clear at this stage that the government should in reality give a negative assessment regarding this goal as well. The employment target is already 50,000 employed people behind, as employment has decreased instead of increased during the government’s term, and this year employment is estimated to decrease by 7,000 employed people. The Ministry of Finance itself also estimates that its own actions, at least the VAT increase, will weaken employment, so in this respect, one can look in the mirror regarding the weakening of employment development.

In yesterday’s A-studio, a representative of the government party, Kopra from the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus), focused on lamenting the weak economic cycle, but currently Finland’s employment development is the weakest in all of Europe, meaning the economic cycle does not explain the entire development.

A worrying factor is the development of long-term unemployment, more on which can be found in the linked article.

"The forecast already speaks of historical numbers. Mähönen says that by the end of this year, there would already be 136,000 long-term unemployed. Those who have been unemployed for a year are counted as long-term unemployed.

If the forecast materializes, the difference would only be a few thousand people from the record after the 1990s recession, when long-term unemployment was at its highest annually, around 143,000.."

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Here’s an interesting investigative journalism piece behind a paywall from Helsingin Sanomat: Juhlittu lakimuutos sai Helsingin kokoisen amerikkalaiskaupungin romahtamaan – Tältä näyttää ”elävien kuolleiden kaupunki” | HS.fi

Summary:

  • In November 2020, the state of Oregon approved a new law by a clear majority, decriminalizing the possession of even hard drugs. The law came into force in February of the following year.

  • Since then, small amounts of cocaine, heroin, or even methamphetamine have been allowed to be carried without significant consequences. The police issue a hundred-dollar petty fine to the user – and even that can be avoided by contacting rehabilitation services. - Users know this but still don’t necessarily call: For example, the “rehabilitation hotline” offered in connection with a possession fine received only 119 calls during the first 15 months.

  • The voting result was met with great enthusiasm. The Drug Policy Alliance, which spent millions lobbying for the law, hailed it as a significant milestone in the United States’ war on drugs. “We believe this victory will inspire other states to pursue drug policies that prioritize health,” said Executive Director Kassandra Frederique.

  • Tax revenues from cannabis sales would be directed to rehabilitation and treatment facilities.

  • Now attitudes have started to change. Residents have had enough.

  • Just five years ago, work in Oregon’s largest city was quite relaxed. Baer would point out people drinking beer in public places, mediate occasional brawls, and listen to the concerns of city residents.

  • The effects were quickly visible in the streetscape. Because there were virtually no consequences, drugs began to be used openly. Alcohol consumption in public places was still prohibited by law, but the same did not apply to other intoxicants.

  • Word of Portland’s change has spread far. There are no official figures, but according to the rescue department, it is clear that people travel to the city from other states because of its open drug policy. The message is that in Portland, police don’t harass people, and the city assists the homeless more generously than other cities. “We are like a dream vacation destination for drug users,” says Rick Graves, communications manager for the rescue department. “Only a small portion of the people we encounter on the streets are from here.”

  • Even rescue personnel question the meaningfulness of helping overdose victims: “A few hours later, the same guy is on the street corner doing the same thing that just almost killed him. Is this even helping? Does this make any sense?”

  • Portland’s current reputation is hard for many locals to swallow. The city, once known for its punk music, hipster cafes, and liberal vibe, is now an example of how drug use can spiral out of control.

  • A former addict summarizes the problems: “Murray criticizes the current system as too generous. Free food, basic healthcare, and some form of housing are too easily available, and therefore people don’t have enough reasons to change. A space has been created where you don’t have to develop, and no one expects anything from you. That’s not right.”

  • Around the time Measure 110 came into force, fentanyl spread across the United States, but the overrepresentation is clear: “Studies cannot give a definitive answer. According to one study, overdoses increased sharply in Oregon with the new law, by 61 percent in two years. During the same period, national growth was 13 percent.”

  • A left-leaning (probably representing the National Coalition Party, max Centre Party in our terms) rescue department employee: “It simply doesn’t suit humanity for there to be no restrictions whatsoever on drug use.”

  • Some of those interviewed believe that the problem is not decriminalization but a lack of services, but an individualistic society does not mandate treatment, so even existing services are underutilized.

Based on this very small sample, the decriminalization of drugs would not seem to work in societies where people have the freedom to destroy their health. I don’t know if it would work if compulsory treatment were in place. A positive aspect is likely the tidying up of neighboring municipalities/states. So NIMBY is worthwhile!

If we also consider the economic side, I do not believe that the resources of welfare areas would be sufficient, even if a small part of the saved resources from prison care and the judiciary could be transferred to them, if a similar decision were to be tried in Finland. On the other hand, one might think that drug sales would increase in areas where possession for personal use is allowed, because there is enough demand. So would police, judicial, and prison care funds actually be saved?

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" * Some of those interviewed believe that the problem is not decriminalization but the lack of services, but an individualistic society does not mandate treatment, so even existing services are underutilized."

If you create legislation for substance use that has not been thoroughly thought through, it cannot be assumed that people will know how to behave when it is not required of them. It is naive to assume that a large portion of substance users even want treatment if, according to their own experience, the substance does not cause them problems.

Decriminalization is a bad solution and always has been, as no one monitors sales or what kind of substances end up for sale. In the Netherlands, we see how the whole place has become a haven for criminals when decriminalization ensures that the production of substances, such as cannabis, remains in the hands of criminals and is not monitored in any way, because decriminalization means that only use is legal, and drugs do not appear out of nowhere; someone always produces them. When production is not monitored, the hard drugs sold can be anything under the sun, and there are no guarantees as to what condition the user will end up in. For example, a person might think they are getting cocaine, but in reality, the substance is a mixture of alpha-PVP, cocaine, and fentanyl, etc., because it cannot be known when production is not monitored by authorities.

The only sensible way is to legalize substances and place them, for example, in pharmacies, where they can be obtained with a prescription, and not allow use in public places, but rather punish it in the same way as during prohibition, so that use remains indoors. Drug users are still users, no matter what the law is, and it is daunting to start experimenting with such decriminalization directly with all substances when it is already difficult to make the equation work with just cannabis due to the aforementioned problem, case Netherlands.

In Finland, cannabis is used extensively and is the most used substance after alcohol. For a large part of the population, cannabis use does not cause problems, or at least not severe enough to seek treatment for them. On the other hand, cannabis users who need help also do not dare to seek treatment when they are classified as criminals and get into trouble with the police, to which decriminalization would bring relief.

Legalization can be done correctly and sensibly without the entire society collapsing, but it requires evaluating each drug to determine whether it is a recreational substance suitable for sale in Alko (like alcohol) or if it is necessary to regulate its use with doctor-issued prescriptions, or even to maintain prohibition for extremely dangerous drugs like fentanyl / alpha-PVP.

So far, only cannabis has been a substance that could potentially be legalized alongside alcohol, provided that the age limit for its use is strictly monitored, similar to alcohol. The risk of problematic use and psychosis is the same as with alcohol use, so tax revenues must be allocated to healthcare services in connection with legalization.

One very good argument for saving police, judiciary, and correctional resources years ago was the Silkkitie investigation: Valtavan Silkkitie-operaation opetus: Sen minkä nettiin laittaa, sitä ei saa sieltä enää pois – Silkkitien miehistö alkaa olla selvillä, mutta jättikö Kapteeni laivan rottien tapaan?  | MTV Uutiset

Excerpts from the article: “With the help of Silkkitie’s seized server, information on 7,500 individuals who conducted transactions on the marketplace has been identified so far”

“Now the situation has reversed, and users incidentally revealed during investigations of serious drug offenses are targeted by authorities. According to authorities, approximately half of the identified individuals have no prior criminal record.”

“Despite media claims and anecdotes, the proportion of underage buyers appears to be remarkably small. The youngest identified buyer is 15 years old, but only 0.04 percent of suspects were minors. For example, there were more buyers over 78 years old, accounting for 0.12 percent.”

Half of the users who were hunted down for drug use offenses were completely ordinary people with no other criminal background, so who won when the police spent several person-years hunting and punishing these individuals when the right solution would have been to offer them substance abuse education or treatment for problematic users? The police cannot choose whether to follow the law, so they acted correctly, but whether this is a sensible use of police resources is up to citizens and politicians to decide. One can only imagine how much this operation cost taxpayers…

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I could imagine that one legalized place surrounded by illegal ones would concentrate problems in that single spot. Implemented more broadly and carefully, a more liberal drug policy seems to work quite well.

I quoted a few interesting passages from Wikipedia here.

Increased uptake of treatment (roughly 60% increase as of 2012.)
Reduction in new HIV diagnoses amongst drug users by 17%and a general drop of 90% in drug-related HIV infection.
In April 2009, the Cato Institute published a White Paper about the “decriminalization” of drugs in Portugal, paid for by the Marijuana Policy Project.Data about the heroin usage rates of 13-16-year-olds from EMCDDA were used in the report to claim that “decriminalization” has had no adverse effect on drug usage rates and that drug-related pathologies - such as sexually transmitted diseases and deaths due to drug usage - had decreased dramatically.

Drug use among adolescents (13–15 years) and “problematic” users declined.
Drug-related criminal justice workloads decreased.
Decreased street value of most illicit drugs, some significantly.
It is estimated that the social cost of drug use decreased by 12% on average in the 5-year period following the establishment of NSAFD in 1999, and an 18% on average reduction since 2010. The social cost of drug use is defined by the sum of public expenditure on drugs, the private costs incurred by individual drug users, and costs taken on by society, including loss of income and loss of productivity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

There’s a lot of talk about sticks and carrots; this “stick” generally guides people quite poorly. Some become paralyzed, and others start fighting against the “stick” instead of their other problems.

Drug addicts, especially “degenerates,” live an incredibly draining and dangerous life anyway. The number one priority is the next dose, which is financed by crime, and if they owe money to a drug dealer, at least bones will be broken. Other addicts are a constant threat, dirty needles cause deadly diseases, etc.

In that scenario, prison or fines are not a deterrent of any kind. If you think about it from an economic perspective, consumption rooms with clean needles are much cheaper than an operating room with a surgical team saving a gangrenous hand that resembles a pincushion.

Preventive youth work and youth mental health work are cheaper than an overloaded police and justice system, full prisons, and lost working years.

Prohibition has not worked very well anywhere. Humanity has used cannabis for 10,000 years, and then a couple of thousand years later, they invented these new arrivals, like alcohol and opium.

The human species seems to be quite fond of intoxicants, and this allowing of alcohol and prohibiting others is quite an artificial line. If something entices black market trade, this is it. Designer drugs are also a huge business thanks to this line; hardly anyone would have thought of developing, for example, the much-talked-about “thumb” (referring to synthetic cannabinoids like “spice” or “K2”), without these restrictions.

The war on drugs is completely unwinnable, so some kind of legislation (like with alcohol) that minimizes harm and might even bring some money into the state coffers would seem more sensible and could work better.

This is certainly a topic that evokes strong emotions, but sometimes it would be good to focus on the facts. The drug problem will surely persist as long as humanity does; an endless war against it is, well, madness. It has been tried, it doesn’t work. Who can keep banging their head against the same wall indefinitely?

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Thank you. Here too, I would just be interested in seeing more statistics and fewer interviews with individuals. A couple of other questions arose. Firstly, there’s talk of more generous social policies compared to other states/cities, and secondly, that apparently (though there are no statistics to support it) people have moved there from other parts of the United States. So, has the overall situation actually changed, or has it just become more concentrated in one area?

Additionally, I would imagine that the mentioned side effects would also be visible in statistics. For example, thefts, shoplifting, etc., and if people are increasingly becoming drug addicts, I would imagine this would be reflected, for instance, in an increasing number of school dropouts, unemployment rates, and so on.

If one lives in the area, I probably wouldn’t be interested in whether the rising crime rate was due to criminals moving into the area from elsewhere, or if more residents started committing crimes, or if existing criminals committed more crimes per person, but from a research perspective, this is very interesting.

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Drug freedom is its own kind of creative destruction, where the genes that lead to drug use are removed. In the same way that France does not have an alcohol problem, but in some “indigenous” community, alcohol can be a catastrophic problem when the Darwinian process is at an earlier stage regarding alcohol availability. The process can simply take a very long time and is brutal for the participants.

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Regarding drugs, the sellers’ motive is to earn a lot of money; by weakening the opportunities for this and increasing punishments, the risk-reward ratio deteriorates. Drug dealers earn the most money from those who are properly addicted, so by giving registered addicts free drugs in certain supervised areas where they are taken under supervision, the biggest incentive could be taken away from drug dealers.

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I doubt the effectiveness of this. You can look at the United States, for example, where there aren’t huge problems with overly lenient sentences for dealers, and yet it still happens. Still, drugs are a bigger problem there than in Europe. Maybe some wannabe TikTok gangster will refrain from their actions, but for a large portion of those involved in drug trafficking, it’s the only way to escape something. Usually, dire circumstances.

Here’s a rather retro article on the matter.

The ineffectiveness of high penalties has been known for quite a long time, but it’s still being proposed. Probably because it’s logical. A normal person would never want to go to prison, but dealers clearly live in a different reality that at least my “normo” brain cannot comprehend. Perhaps it’s time to try something new? I don’t know what, though.

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Perhaps the examples in these drug discussions are a bit selective. The welfare and GDP of the Netherlands are the third highest in Europe, even though the attitude towards cannabis has been permissive for decades. Switzerland isn’t doing badly either, even though easily accessible substitution therapy and consumption rooms have been used for harm reduction for decades. Drug deaths and harm reduction in Portugal significantly improved after the legalization of use, so it’s perhaps peculiar and tendentious, in light of these examples, to highlight, for instance, one state in the United States.

In the Netherlands, that harbinger of free cannabis use in Europe, there are fewer psychosis cases than in Finland, so something is clearly wrong with the predicted explosion of psychosis cases after cannabis liberalization.

Signed: Cannabis to Alko or pharmacies, and consumption rooms and easy access to substitution therapies now.

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The whole list is a bit of a joke. My favorites are these 10-30% cuts, where the justifications are that more efficient operations are presented: “A 20% efficiency improvement compared to the 2023 level is proposed for the Enforcement Authority and the Office of the Bankruptcy Ombudsman.”

It’s convenient to make cuts and then state that they should work a bit more efficiently, as if there hadn’t been a process ongoing all the time.

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