It’s been 14 years since Portugal legalized the use of all drugs, including blow, weed, meth, crack, E and even smack. That’s right. If you’re in Portugal, you can walk the streets with a ten-day supply of any controlled substance that would land you in jail in the US and receive no fine, no citation and certainly no jail time.
If you’ve got more than a 10-day supply, the worst you’ll get is a fine. Better yet—a free trip to rehab, since most of the time the court sends violators off to state-funded treatment instead of asking them to feed the country money.
You’d think this decriminalization might skyrocket drug use, abuse and overdoses, but according to a report just released by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, it turns out legalization is awesome for everyone.
Just Say No!
When the Portuguese government pushed for drug legalization in 2001 due to an HIV epidemic within the heroin-using community, there were plenty of hysterics. Citizens and commentators—both inside the country and out—were certain legalization would make drug addicts out of almost anyone. They thought kids would get their hands on the dirty stuff, start using and overdoses would boom across the tiny country.
Not only did this not happen, but heroin use has been sliced in half, new HIV cases have plummeted and deaths from drug overdoses have decreased by 75%. Portugal now boasts the second-lowest rate of drug overdoses in the European Union—just three deaths from drugs for every 1,000,000 citizens. The EU average of deaths is 17.3 per million.
Big difference.
The War on Public Health
It’s very disturbing to compare Portugal’s drug overdose death statistics to those in the US, where overdoses from heroin have more than quadrupled since 2001. It’s a similar story with prescription drugs—deaths from opioid painkillers and benzos have nearly quadrupled. Cocaine overdoses have stayed the same since 2001, although they spiked around 2006.
Thomas McLellan, former Deputy Director of the US Office of National Drug Control Policy, had some thoughts on Portugal’s drug legalization when he was in office at the beginning of the Obama Administration.
“If you make any attractive commodity available at lower cost, you will have more users,” He said.
Ouch. That’s embarrassing for McLellan, who was replaced by Michael Botticelli in 2012, a drug czar who definitely favors treatment over incarceration (and who also happens to be sober).
Single-Payer Rehab
So why has drug use decreased so dramatically? One of the main reasons is that all the money the country paid toward criminalization, including incarceration and the paychecks of law enforcement, is now being funneled into treatment.
Our great nation could certainly learn from this. With health insurance companies determining how long patients can stay in residential treatment programs, getting adequate care is often not feasible for addicts and alcoholics. Even worse, many of them are just thrown behind bars, which costs more and does no one any good.
The question is not whether legalization works to help cut down drug abuse, the question is when America will catch on.
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