Friday, May 22, 2009

Portugal's Success Ending the War on Drugs

Portugal did the unthinkable. It legalized possession of drugs, across the board. It did so 8 years ago. And the results? None of the bogeyman stories we are so used to hearing came true. Everything got better, not worse:

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.


Of course, all this was expected from the data we did have, and from the consistently dishonest rhetoric used over the years by those who have defended the drug war so vigorously. What's now new is actual politicians are starting to pay a little attention to reality and at least consider there might be a better way:

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.


It's one small step for man...

4 comments:

Ronaldo said...

"in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined"

I guess I don't understand the way "illegal" is defined. When personal possession was decriminalized, wouldn't that make illegal drug use go to ZERO?

"while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled."

How has the wait in Emergency Rooms fared?

ScienceAvenger said...

Decriminalized = still illegal, but no longer a felony, like speeding.

There wasn't any comment on emergency rooms that I noticed, but given reduction in use, would we not expect a proportionate reduction in emergency room and other hospital visits?

Ronaldo said...

Thanks for your first answer.
For your question, I have no idea if there would be a reduction in hospital visits considering "while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled."

memphisto said...

The difference (obvious to anyone who thinks about this for even a minute) is that there would be an initial swell of people who sought drug treatment which would eventually trickle down to the number of first time drug users - the number of hard core addicts who will never seek treatment -> (I don't have a "yields" sign on my computer) the number of recovered addicts + the incorrigible addicts + the people who never sought treatment. In all possible scenarios the number of people off drugs increases. Even taking new users who would never have tried drugs without them being legal, the number of hard-core addicts who don't respond to treatment is less than the number of currently marginalized people who have no sensible way to exit addiction. At most it would increase the number of people who can use the drug casually without significant harm to their lifestyle.