For the past few decades, the United States and the majority of the developed world have channeled an inordinate amount of funds to continue the proverbial and generally fruitless “War on Drugs.” In 2001, Portugal decided to approach drug policy in a different way; it passed a sweeping law decriminalizing all illicit drugs.
In April, the Cato Institute, a non-partisan libertarian think tank, published a report after conducting an empirical study on the effects of the decriminalization law from 2001-2006. A recent TIME article discussed the paper and its findings. Across the board, Portugal’s drug use numbers have been positively affected. Most interestingly for the health community, a Scientific American article cites the number of new HIV cases contracted by injecting drug users dropping from 1,400 in 2000 to around 400 in 2006. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the European Union (EU) narcotic watchdog organization, has also confirmed this downward trend with its own research. Harm reduction initiatives such as syringe exchange programs are actively promoted in the entire EU. However, this marked reduction has not been observed in all EU member states with significant HIV prevalence rates among injecting drug users since 2001.
Drug abuse has long been viewed as a social problem, yet addiction is defined as a chronic disease by the National Institutes of Health. This fact, along with other global health implications such as the HIV contraction rates mentioned above, show that narcotics policy is of significant concern for the health community.
There are those skeptical, if not critical, of Portugal’s experience. Professor Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, verbalizes his concern in the TIME article that cultural difference and sheer size make implementation of a Portuguese-style decriminalization scheme difficult in a county like the United States. The hard data presented in the Cato report, however, is very straightforward. As the author of the report Glenn Greenwald stated: “The data show that, judged by virtually every metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework has been a resounding success.”