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Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?

S.J.B.

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Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?
Susana Ferreira
The Guardian
December 5th, 2017

When the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the 80s, and by the time one in 10 people had slipped into the depths of heroin use – bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners – Portugal was in a state of panic.

Álvaro Pereira was working as a family doctor in Olhão in southern Portugal. “People were injecting themselves in the street, in public squares, in gardens,” he told me. “At that time, not a day passed when there wasn’t a robbery at a local business, or a mugging.”

The crisis began in the south. The 80s were a prosperous time in Olhão, a fishing town 31 miles west of the Spanish border. Coastal waters filled fishermen’s nets from the Gulf of Cádiz to Morocco, tourism was growing, and currency flowed throughout the southern Algarve region. But by the end of the decade, heroin began washing up on Olhão’s shores. Overnight, Pereira’s beloved slice of the Algarve coast became one of the drug capitals of Europe: one in every 100 Portuguese was battling a problematic heroin addiction at that time, but the number was even higher in the south. Headlines in the local press raised the alarm about overdose deaths and rising crime. The rate of HIV infection in Portugal became the highest in the European Union. Pereira recalled desperate patients and families beating a path to his door, terrified, bewildered, begging for help. “I got involved,” he said, “only because I was ignorant.”

In truth, there was a lot of ignorance back then. Forty years of authoritarian rule under the regime established by António Salazar in 1933 had suppressed education, weakened institutions and lowered the school-leaving age, in a strategy intended to keep the population docile. The country was closed to the outside world; people missed out on the experimentation and mind-expanding culture of the 1960s. When the regime ended abruptly in a military coup in 1974, Portugal was suddenly opened to new markets and influences. Under the old regime, Coca-Cola was banned and owning a cigarette lighter required a licence. When marijuana and then heroin began flooding in, the country was utterly unprepared.

Pereira tackled the growing wave of addiction the only way he knew how: one patient at a time. A student in her 20s who still lived with her parents might have her family involved in her recovery; a middle-aged man, estranged from his wife and living on the street, faced different risks and needed a different kind of support. Pereira improvised, calling on institutions and individuals in the community to lend a hand.

Read the full story here.
 
Thanks for posting this SJB. I need to reread a commission in the UK's review of decriminalization again. Just gotta find it first :)

Lots of wonderful drug policy stuff coming out of the UK these days (well, considering I don't actually live there, take that with a grain of salt, as I know the situation in Ireland, Scotland and parts of Britain is pretty bad right now).
 
The problem with legislation here in the states is, they're all to stupid to realize drug laws are causing violence. They're what keeps the cartels going. Most gang violence is drug related. If they were legal there's not much money in it.
 
Perhaps an even bigger problem here is how much our society's various institutions are almost totally invested in continuing the war on drugs. The private prison industry is now beyond huge, and broader organs of the criminal justice system derive a whole lot of revenue from prosecuting drug related crimes. There is so much invested in maintaining the status qua, it's scary.

I like looking at drug policy in terms of harm though, like your post alluded to. When the drug policy leads to more harm than the drug use it is supposed to regulate (and criminalization is a form of regulation), well there is something fucked up about the system.

Most people just don't understand how much harm drug policy does though, or they think it only affects people who use drugs. What we need in our country is to get people who don't use drugs or identify with drugs users to understand how improving our drug policy would improve their own lives and their own community - it isn't just for drug users, it's about EVERYONE. Drug policy reform would affect all people in a positive light, at least if managed well. Identifying drugs users as the "other" instead of normalizing them as human beings is a huge stumbling block to decriminalization in the states though.

We've spend so much money, resources and effort demonizing the drug user (from the time of Refeer Madness to present) that it is going to take some real effort to get people to see drug users as no less deserving of their basic human rights than anyone else. In other words, to see drug users as something other than criminal - but it's sort of a catch 22, because what comes first, decriminalizing drug use or learning to see drug users as other than criminal?
 
I have been saying for a long time now that drug use and possession should be decriminalized. The "war on drugs" has gotten us nowhere. You cannot wage war upon an inanimate object....somehow we are ALWAYS able to find a jail cell for an addict, but unable to produce enough hospital beds for all the people who need help. Unfortunately, something like this will never happen in the United States. Our citizens best interest and personal well being has fallen by the wayside. Maybe one day the money will talk....maybe one day we will decide that the current opioid epidemic has cost us enough financially and in lives. But I don't see it happening. The fact that recreational marijuana is still illegal in so many states, shows that we have a long way to go. People get their panties in a wad over some pot....can you imagine proposing legalizing other drugs?
 
Three words: Money in Politics.

The fact that the corporate whores in D.C. have been bought off by special interests - including Big Alcohol, Big Tobacco and especially Big Pharma - means that they'll go with whatever their puppet masters deem appropriate.

Of course, "appropriate" for the pharmaceutical industry always means, in one form or another, "fiduciary responsibility." And so, it's no secret that they view the legalization of Cannabis Sativa/Indica for recreational use as competition (as does Big Alcohol and Big Tobacco). As such, they have been spending a lot of money on convincing elected officials to oppose efforts to legalize weed at state and federal levels. They also air propaganda which essentially begs the American people to "think of the children."

Again, money in politics is the cancer which has facilitated the change in how America functions: from a democracy to an oligarchy.

Net Neutrality is another issue (of many) which has been influenced by corporate greed - thanks Ajit Pai. I bet Comcast (or is it Verizon) will reward you handsomely for fucking over a nation in excess of 300,000,000 citizens.

If my American counterparts fail to excise the legalized bribery mentioned above, then I fear that America's best days are long gone. And the thought of that being a reality is heartbreaking, even for a foreigner, good day.
 
There is one very good reason that the U.S. has not and cannot copy Portugal and that is our lack of a national health care system. Portugal considers drug abuse and drug addiction to be a health problem rather than a criminal (or moral) problem. That means they treat these problems with medical care, psychological care and social services. So we could copy Portugal in decriminalizing drugs but we could not duplicate at this time the treatment they offer people. We don't even provide basic medical services so how would we support the complexity of services needed to address addiction?

Not only that but their police force was re-trained and educated around these issues. Can you imagine U.S. cops, that have been trained to treat drug users and especially drug dealers as society's worst problem, being able to hold even a speck of respect? Not to mention what would most of them do all day? You would have to hold a mass brainwashing of police here.

What Portugal did was revolutionary on all counts but it was done holistically, not piecemeal. The world could learn a lot from their policies. I still advocate for decriminalization across the board but I do not buy into the fantasy that we would have a picture that looks like Portugal. Without healthcare, it would cease to be a mess in the legal/criminal sense but it would remain a mess for society. I think anyone in the U.S. that campaigns for an end to the war on drugs needs to campaign equally hard for a national basic health care system and funding for mental health.
 
Most definitely, the us is far behind most other countries in the world, on many social issues, healthcare being a massive one
 
I think the particular history in the case of Portugal's case is significant as well. Having just come out from under a dictatorship, then becoming awash in drug (particularly opioid/heroin) use, allowed them to see the flaws of the war on drugs approach to addiction or public policy to be a pretty obvious dead end. It also make the potential for the birth of a "revolutionary" approach to treating drug use and addiction in terms as a primarily and essentially public health issue much more plausible, as there had just been a literal political revolution in the country.

Americans would rather have political stability, even if that means a military industrial complex, mass incarceration, entrenched bigotry and all the other ills of our particularly American take on "free market society". We have so many ghosts to haunt us, I guess it's easier to try and ignore them and push ahead for a lot of people. Hence the prevalence of substance use and behavioral disorders throughout out society.

Obviously I'm rereading Globalization of Addiction right now =D sooooo good :)
 
Most people just don't understand how much harm drug policy does though, or they think it only affects people who use drugs. What we need in our country is to get people who don't use drugs or identify with drugs users to understand how improving our drug policy would improve their own lives and their own community - it isn't just for drug users, it's about EVERYONE. Drug policy reform would affect all people in a positive light, at least if managed well. Identifying drugs users as the "other" instead of normalizing them as human beings is a huge stumbling block to decriminalization in the states though.

you mean like law enforcmeent and college students? stuff like MAPS mdma for ptsd trials, and the microdosing lsd craze, following along with states legalizing recreational marijuana, show that the tide is slowly changing, FINALLY.
 
Totally, lots of respect for them. But a lot of people don’t really identify with either of those groups either, law enforcement, students or people researching the medicinal uses of entheogens.

I don’t mean to say I have all the answers, because believe me I don’t believe that whatsoever. I just know we need to change our ways, because they simply haven’t been working (more specifically they haven’t been solving the problems they were supposedly designed to solve; if anything they’ve exacerbated them).

That book I mentioned is a pretty amazing synthesis of most of my sentiments on this topic though. It’s wonderful in promise but amazing sad given the way things have been for the last century (or really the last few centuries).

I agree in terms of how good things seem to be happening on these fonts right now, especially how they seem to be gaining wider acceptance, but there is still so much more work to be done on this front than not. It’s fucking fascinating, but also very dark and sorrowful.

My cup of tea :)
 
What Portugal did was revolutionary on all counts but it was done holistically, not piecemeal. The world could learn a lot from their policies. I still advocate for decriminalization across the board but I do not buy into the fantasy that we would have a picture that looks like Portugal. Without healthcare, it would cease to be a mess in the legal/criminal sense but it would remain a mess for society. I think anyone in the U.S. that campaigns for an end to the war on drugs needs to campaign equally hard for a national basic health care system and funding for mental health.

In my opinion, that's a fair point. I hope to see it become a reality.
 
There's too much money involved in the us. Private prisons, probation companies, fines, drug classes, rehabs. the war on drugs is big business.
 
It's a false assumption to assume the aim of government, and especially democratic government is to judge decisions based on if they'll work.

They don't even care if the decisions they've already made have worked. That's not what they use to determine success. Success is determined by popularity and money. But not evidence of success.

Which is why if I were making my own society I would introduce a system where all bills had to specifically explain what they were supposed to do with an independent body to evaluate if it was successful. And if not the law would basically sunset. A new type of bicameral or maybe even tricameral legislative system.

Not a perfect solution but there probably isn't a perfect solution. Not when the people elected to be in charge intentionally try and find ways to game the system out of self interest.

It's so frustrating that nothing in the system is designed to concern itself with if any policies or laws actually worked or not. That concept kinda got forgotten in the assumption democratic accountability was either more important or would handle that part for it.

People suck. They just fucking suck.
 
Agreed. Although I'm also beginning to feel like it has a lot to do with how we relate to popularity and money as individuals versus as a society.

Crack that nut and you've got a harmonious culture :)

What that would like like in an age of globalization/"post-modernity," I have no idea (well, I have a little).
 
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