At a news conference marking the 10th anniversary of Portugal's bold experiment in drug policy — the decriminalization of all drugs — Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drugs Addiction, said, “There is no doubt that the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal." The number of addicts who repeatedly use hard and intravenous drugs has fallen by half since the early 1990s, when the figure was estimated at around 100,000 people. Goulao, a medical doctor, stressed that treatment decriminalization was not solely responsible for the drop, but that treatment programs and risk reduction policies also played a role. As E.D. Cain...

15 February, 2012

Faced with the conspicuous failure of the war on drugs, the Harper Government proposes to escalate it, as if doing more of something that failed is likely to succeed. Portugal took a different approach. On July 1(!), 2001, that country decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs, a move many feared would accelerate social decay. The British Journal of Criminology has published a study of what actually happened: This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in...

28 January, 2011