Hat tip to Tim Starr and his Yahoo Group, 'Fight for Liberty'.
http://www.time. com/time/ health/article/ 0,8599,1893946, 00.html
Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?
By Maia Szalavitz
Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It's
not the Netherlands. )
Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana
haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the
Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is
Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish
all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana,
cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.
At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing
Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The
argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that
incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts
health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of
possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a
psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which
may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.
The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor,
socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug
possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's
drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in
Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato
Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.
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.
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.
At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem
with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and
fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient
drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the
country's number one public health problem, he says.
"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was
before decriminalization, " says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug
czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that
police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and
larger quantities of drugs.
Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of
Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato
Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its
central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a
small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to
occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in
heroin use and deaths.
The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data
shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that
is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he
says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate."
Balance of article at:
http://www.time. com/time/ health/article/ 0,8599,1893946, 00.html
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