A look at Portugal's legalization of drugs

The Boston Globe last week ran a piece on Portugal's experiment in drug legalization.

It's a pretty positive story, though not unmixedly so (and no one should have expected it to be). One statistic cited to show the failure of Portugal's decriminalization policy, though, proves that preconceptions can blind you to what data actually mean.

According to the latest report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the number of Portuguese aged 15 to 64 who have ever tried illegal drugs has climbed from 7.8 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2007. The percentage of people who have tried cannabis, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, ecstasy, and LSD all increased in that time frame. Cannabis use, according to the drug report, has gone up from 7.6 to 11.7 percent. Heroin use jumped from 0.7 to 1.1 percent, and cocaine use nearly doubled — from 0.9 to 1.9 percent. In other words, said Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, the changes in Portugal have had a somewhat expected outcome: More people are trying drugs.

“What it says to me is that when you decriminalize, use goes up — potentially dramatically,” said Humphreys. “You can see a doubling of cocaine use, a doubling of heroin use. And because drug use carries some risk — no one disputes that — it becomes inevitable that as use goes up, more people will get hurt.”

First, the article conflates "trying" drugs with "using" them. There's a big difference. Not everyone who has ever tried marijuana, or even cocaine or heroin, has become a regular user, though the risks of addiction are obviously much greater with the latter two. It's not clear what the monitoring center actually measured, so there's no way for me to know if Humphreys' finger-wagging is justified.

However, even if it is, Humphreys is still handicapped by a large blind spot. "As use goes up, more people will get hurt" is an argument that can be applied to the legal drug alcohol as well. I don't know if Humphreys wants to make alcohol illegal on that basis, but it doesn't matter because the U.S. is never going to return to Prohibition: that experiment failed on a massive scale and everyone knows it.

A decent counterargument to Humphreys' position is that it's quite possible legalization of some drugs, combined with proper education of their effects and proper treatment for abuse, would result in a reduced strain on our justice system and lower costs overall. It might not, of course. But spectacular misinformation disseminated by the federal government (about marijuana in particular), and the resulting distortion of our national debate about controlled substances, have prevented us from even engaging in a serious discussion about a realistic strategy to combat drug abuse. That's the real problem, and that's why Portugal's experiment is so important to watch.

No one knows how much, if any, of Portugal's great experiment would work in the U.S. Still, what Portugal has done should be studied for what it can teach us. The problem with applying any of it, though, is that federal drug policy prevents the states from acting as the smaller-scale laboratories that they were intended to be for controversial policies. Maybe that's a good starting point for the U.S.: to revisit the federal government's draconian controlled-substance policies to allow for state governments to customize their approaches to drug enforcement.

One last caveat:

Even [Portuguese drug czar João] Goulão himself cautions against decriminalizing drugs without offering what he called “the whole package”: expanded treatment services, increased prevention measures, and a nationalized effort to attack drug addiction, and its consequences, as a public health problem, not a criminal justice issue. “There’s no choice,” he said, “in becoming an addict.”