Cato study: Decriminalization of drugs in Portugal an "unambiguous success"

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Cato study: Decriminalization of drugs in Portugal an "unambiguous success"
Western Standard
4.3.09


In 2001, Portugal decided to make a dramatic U-turn when it comes to drug policy. Alone in the European Union, Portugal decided to try decriminalization of drugs as a strategy to deal with the negative outcomes of illicit drug use. They did not merely decriminalize marijuana, they decriminalized all drugs. Without exception.

Glenn Greenwald has taken a look at the numbers and reports, in a new Cato Institute study, on the outcomes of Portugal's new policy direction. The results, according to him, are positive. And not merely positive, but very positive. Decriminalization in Portugal is working, it is an "unambiguous success," as Greenwald puts it.

Greenwald will be at the Cato Institute today to discuss his reports. At 12 p.m. Eastern Time, you can watch his presentation by clicking here.

In the meantime, here is the summary he presents to his own readers:

...Drug policy is being more openly debated than ever before in the U.S. (Time 's Joe Klein just wrote a column advocating marijuana legalization [CNN's Jack Cafferty also recently wrote a piece entitled "The War on Drugs is insane."]), and the unambiguous success of Portugal's 2001 decriminalization -- which is what enabled the Portuguese Government to address their exploding drug problems in the 1990s and to achieve far better results than virtually every other Western country -- provides a compelling empirical basis for understanding the profound failures of the American approach.

And, for more intrepid researchers, here is the study itself:

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies, Cato White Paper

Link!
 
The war on drugs in the US is too much of a profitable business for it to ever be given up. It's like a cash cow, that's why Obama laughed at the the fact of legalizing MJ.
 
Just another thing we could all have predicted but the nay sayers will deny no matter the evidence put forth. Honestly, there have been enough facts and logic to back up this theory for ever, these results will change nothing sadly.
 
So I could go to Portugal on a drug vacation? Oh I had to read it again, decriminalized not legalized. Damn no OTC speedballs prepackaged in a syringe? :( damn. Any bluelighters have any first hand account of the drug scene out there? Are there still noncriminal penalties for pocession/sales? Is it like the Cali medical cannabis deal?

I'm guessing they just made drugs a low priority/only fines etc. If that's the case, it's still awesome but I'm still waiting for my OTC speedballs.
 
...Quality.. no idea what its like.. really good smoke tho if its anything like southern spain..

Interesting.. ++
 
my parents are moving there, I hear there is plenty of hash from Morroco there :D
 
TIME -- The Portuguese Experiment: Did Legalizing Drugs Work?

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."

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
 
Interesting... Kind of like on The Wire when they made 3 zones open for drug dealing and using but set up needle exchanges and condom give aways and shit and the crime went down all over the district. Hopefully more open minded politicians get wind of this and seriously look at it instead of dismissing it because of differences between the two countries.
 
The only way to win the war on drugs is to just end it. But the problem with most politicians is that they are too cowardly to do what is right unless it will enrich themselves or help their reelection. Hopefully the media will continue to sway public opinion to end prohibition.
 
What I hate is that Portugal is held up as a success only because the data shows a decline in use and lower rates than neighboring countries, everyone is still hung up thinking drugs are something to be stopped. It would be a success even if use doubled, people have the right to use drugs period. These articles don't seem to care about the rights of drug users, they only champion ending prohibition as a way to reduce use.
 
garuda said:
What I hate is that Portugal is held up as a success only because the data shows a decline in use and lower rates than neighboring countries, everyone is still hung up thinking drugs are something to be stopped. It would be a success even if use doubled, people have the right to use drugs period. These articles don't seem to care about the rights of drug users, they only champion ending prohibition as a way to reduce use.
Click to expand...

Exactly my thinking.
Portuguese are now free to open their consciousness any way they want to.
What could be more successful than that?
FREEDOM!!!!!
 
Interesting article and it really should have some of these prohibitionist policy makers blushing. In the end though its irrelevant and Garuda's post says it all.
 
garuda said:
What I hate is that Portugal is held up as a success only because the data shows a decline in use and lower rates than neighboring countries, everyone is still hung up thinking drugs are something to be stopped. It would be a success even if use doubled, people have the right to use drugs period. These articles don't seem to care about the rights of drug users, they only champion ending prohibition as a way to reduce use.
Click to expand...

yes, agreed, but do you expect any (respectable) news source to state that using drugs is a positive thing?
 
By waging a war on drugs we're subsidizing our own fat parasitic pharmaceutical industry. It's that simple, what would happen to their profits if suddenly a pain management therapy came on the market that was all natural, had little to no side effects and was as cheap as dirt?

That my friends is why drugs are illegal.

It would be far far better for the government if we legalized drugs, they could make billions in taxes.

BTW I'm moving to Portugal.
 
Huaca said:
It would be far better for us if the government legalized drugs AND stopped spending so much of our money.
Click to expand...

Exactly my point the more taxes we get from drugs the less we have to pay in other taxes.

Now if we could just stop electing crazy idiots who think its OK to spend 12b dollars a month fighting wars whose only purpose is to make the price of Oil spike so that his friends can all make tons of money refining it...

Oh wait, we did.
 
Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?

Well, it seems too.. And my parents just moved there :D

time-logo.png

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."

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
 
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