Drug Decriminalization in Portugal

[Hausse 0]

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal

Nick Gillespie | July 2009 Print Edition

Glenn Greenwald is a civil rights attorney, a blogger for Salon, and the author of a new Cato Institute policy study called “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Policies.” The paper examines Portugal’s experiment with decriminalizing possession of drugs for personal use, which began in 2001. Nick Gillespie, editor of reason.com and reason.tv, sat down with Greenwald in April.

Q: What is the difference between decriminalization and legalization?

A: In a decriminalized framework, the law continues to prohibit drug usage, but it’s completely removed from the criminal sphere, so that if you violate that prohibition or do the activity that the law says you cannot do you’re no longer committing a crime. You cannot be turned into a criminal by the state. Instead, it’s deemed to be an administrative offense only, and you’re put into an administrative proceeding rather than a criminal proceeding.

Q: What happened in Portugal?

A: The impetus behind decriminalization was not that there was some drive to have a libertarian ideology based on the idea that adults should be able to use whatever substances they want. Nor was it because there’s some idyllic upper-middle-class setting. Portugal is a very poor country. It’s not Luxembourg or Monaco or something like that.

In the 1990s they had a spiraling, out-of-control drug problem. Addiction was skyrocketing. Drug-related pathologies were increasing rapidly. They were taking this step out of desperation. They convened a council of apolitical policy experts and gave them the mandate to determine which optimal policy approach would enable them to best deal with these drug problems. The council convened and studied all the various options. Decriminalization was the answer to the question, “How can we best limit drug usage and drug addiction?” It was a policy designed to do that.

Q: One of the things you found is that decriminalization actually correlates with less drug use. A basic theory would say that if you lower the cost of doing drugs by making it less criminally offensive, you would have more of it.

A: The concern that policy makers had, the frustration in the 1990s when they were criminalizing, is the more they criminalized, the more the usage rates went up. One of the reasons was because when you tell the population that you will imprison them or treat them as criminals if they identify themselves as drug users or you learn that they’re using drugs, what you do is you create a barrier between the government and the citizenry, such that the citizenry fears the government. Which means that government officials can’t offer treatment programs. They can’t communicate with the population effectively. They can’t offer them services.

Once Portugal decriminalized, a huge amount of money that had gone into putting its citizens in cages was freed up. It enabled the government to provide meaningful treatment to people who wanted it, and so addicts were able to turn into non–drug users and usage rates went down.

Q: What’s the relevance for the United States?

A: We have debates all the time now about things like drug policy reform and decriminalization, and it’s based purely in speculation and fear mongering of all the horrible things that are supposedly going to happen if we loosen our drug laws. We can remove ourselves from the realm of the speculative by looking at Portugal, which actually decriminalized seven years ago, in full, [use and possession of] every drug. And see that none of that parade of horribles that’s constantly warned of by decriminalization opponents actually came to fruition. Lisbon didn’t turn into a drug haven for drug tourists. The explosion in drug usage rates that was predicted never materialized. In fact, the opposite happened.

Source:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/133856.html

[TomAiello 25]

Anything that's not hurting someone else ought to be decriminalized (or better yet, legalized).

BASE jumping, for example.
The idea that you can commit a "crime" that has no victim is nonsensical at best.

-- Tom Aiello

[email protected]
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[rlucus 0]

Quote

Anything that's not hurting someone else ought to be decriminalized (or better yet, legalized).

BASE jumping, for example.
The idea that you can commit a "crime" that has no victim is nonsensical at best.

Just to play Devils Advocate with you for a minute...

I don't know of any laws that make BASE Jumping illegal, but trespassing is.

( I know the National Park law about delivering goods by air thing doesn't really fit either category and should be re-written.)

[TomAiello 25]

Quote

Quote

Anything that's not hurting someone else ought to be decriminalized (or better yet, legalized).

BASE jumping, for example.
The idea that you can commit a "crime" that has no victim is nonsensical at best.

Just to play Devils Advocate with you for a minute...

I don't know of any laws that make BASE Jumping illegal, but trespassing is.

( I know the National Park law about delivering goods by air thing doesn't really fit either category and should be re-written.)

Currently, BASE is illegal by either statute or administrative regulation in National Parks, in about half of the state parks, in the city of Denver, Colorado, and by statute from about a half dozen specific objects (the Golden Gate Bridge, for example). There is also a series of rulemaking decisions indicating that BASE may not be allowed in designated wilderness, but that issue hasn't been litigated.

The problem is that the NPS prohibition, along with the wilderness prohibtion, covers virtually all of the slider up cliffs in the continental United States, and certainly covers the very safest of them.

I'm fairly well educated on this particular micro-issue for reasons of personal interest.

-- Tom Aiello

[email protected]
SnakeRiverBASE.com

[vortexring 0]

Sounds all good to me. I provided a similiar argument here:

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3491396;#3491396

And here:

http://www.dropzone.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=3498021;#3498021

'for it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "chuck 'im out, the brute!" But it's "saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.'

[rlucus 0]

I agree BASE should be allowed in state and national parks (when I started skydiving it was in Utah where there are lots of legal places to go) As I have plans to get into BASE.

But my nitpicking point was that there is no federal or state laws (that I know of) stopping you from BASE jumping off an object that you own or have the owners permission to jump. The statutes and regulations in place only list out specific places that you do not have permission to jump.

Like I said I support allowing BASE Jumping on gov land just like any other outdoor activity. If your allowed to hike it or climb it you should be able to jump off it. I'm just pointing out that many people BASE is actually illegal.



Back on topic...

I fully support the decriminalization of marijuana. (No I don't smoke it) But I believe it will fix way more problems than it would cause.

[tkhayes 124]

yes please - how did this turn into a base discussion?

let's talk about drugs -

I am for decriminalizing it all - what we have does not work - try something different - ANYTHING.

of course it will never get past the religious right wing, afterall, THEIR kids don't do drugs.... and therefore no one should.....

[jgoose71 0]

I think the best solution is not to give any jail time for drugs. It should just be a ticket. You got Coke? Here is your ticket and the cop moves on. The jails are way to over crowded to waste our time on this crap.

On the flip side, I think that if your job impacts the safety of others, you should be drug tested.

Your rights stop where my rights start. Just my $.02

"There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
Life, the Universe, and Everything

[Rookie120 0]

Are they talking about making all drugs legal or just certain ones?

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck!

[tkhayes 124]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html

results look fairly positive to me - I bet they are saving a bunch of money on jails and spending a bunch on rehab.

I bet the rehab costs a lot less than jail. in more ways than just $$