What America can learn from Portugal's drug war

Rarely do I hear an audience clap at the end of a movie, but when I went to see Michael Moore's "Where to Invade Next?" people clapped.

The movie was not about which countries we had invaded, but about what we could learn from the countries that took American ideas of liberty and expanded on those ideas in a new way. These are ways that we might want to think about in America.

I was impressed by Moore's portrayal of Portugal and the "drug war." Portugal changed its drug laws in 2001. Contrary to what people think, Portugal did not legalize drugs; it decriminalized the possession of drugs. It made it an administrative charge if a person possessed less than 10 days' use of the drug.

Along with changing the criminalization of drugs, Portugal also invested in treatment and what is called "harm reduction" services. Having worked in drug treatment before becoming a journalist, I am aware of the arguments for and against needle exchange. Although some people think needle exchange in the U.S. promotes drug use, many in the drug treatment community think that every time an addict gives up a needle for exchange, there is a point of intervention that can later lead to the addict getting treatment. Portugal has made an amazing turnaround. Before the drug laws were revised, almost 1 percent of the population had a heroin addiction, and Portugal had the highest drug-related AIDS deaths in Europe.

A report on Portugal's policy completed in 2015 by the Drug Policy Alliance found that since the policy was enacted 15 years ago, there has been no major increase in the use of drugs, with drug usage remaining below rates in the rest of Europe and the United States. Portugal has had a 60 percent decline in people arrested for drugs, and the percentage of people in 1999 in the prison system for drug law violations also decreased dramatically from 44 percent to 24 percent in 2013. Per capita cost for social drug usage decreased by 18 percent, too.

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At last count, the number of people in drug treatment increased by 60 percent with 70 percent of those receiving treatment for opioids. The number of drug-related HIV cases also decreased from 626 to 74 cases. You don't have to have a degree in accounting to understand that it is a huge cost savings to the public for HIV treatment. With the more liberal drug laws in place, one would expect "drug tourism" to have increased, but it has not.

Last June, the Washington Post published an article on the effect of Portugal's law change. The article, written by Christopher Ingraham, quotes some doomsday predictions by American experts at the time the law went into effect.

"If you make any attractive commodity available at lower cost, you will have more users," said former Office of National Drug Control Policy Deputy Director Thomas McLellan of Portugal's policies.

Former Secretary Joseph Califano, founder of the Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia, is quoted in the article as saying that decriminalization would "increase illegal drug availability and use among our children." In the same Washington Post article, it shows research that points to Portugal having the second-lowest number of drug overdose deaths in the European Union, with only Romania having fewer.

Looking at the statistics of marijuana arrests in the United States, it makes no sense to use our limited resources by arresting people. According to DrugPolicy.org the number of arrests for marijuana law violations were 700,993, with 88 percent of those going for possession only. Fifty-seven percent of people incarcerated for a drug offense were black or Latino, although use is apparently the same as in the white population.

The original thinking was that an alcohol tax could provide treatment and alcohol reduction promotion. DrugPolicy.org says that if the state of California were to tax and regulate the sale of marijuana, the amount it would bring in annually would reach $1.4 billion. That is a lot of treatment slots for addiction.

However you want to look at it, the United States' "war on drugs" first proposed by then-President Richard Nixon, has been a failure. We need to look at a new model. The Portugal experiment, as depicted by Michael Moore's new movie, is one model that we ought to consider. Despite dire warnings of what would happen if we decriminalize personal drug possession, it has worked in Portugal and is worth a try in the United States. It most likely will only get a population less addicted and cost taxpayers less, too.

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