Portuguese Drugs

Recently (just now), I took a departure into the wonderful world of CATO, my favorite think tank because I noticed an article they had upon a topic that has piqued my interest for years. Namely: the legalization of drugs.

In his article – part of a longer piece for CATO – “Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies (http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080)” Glenn Greenwald briefly explores what has been done in Portugal. As the headline suggests, Portugal recently “decriminalized” drugs. Greenwald is careful to note that this does not entail legalization. Oh no! All this means, is that they are taken out of the criminal sphere. In other words, you can be busted for having drugs, but you won’t be prosecuted in a criminal court.

Greenwald studies this in more detail in the 31 page piece he wrote on this idea (yeah, I read this too) but he notes in the piece that all the negative effects that Portugal thought this move would have (i.e. drug rates skyrocket, Lisbon becomes a drug haven, etc.) haven’t actually happened. This prompted Portugal to look more favorably upon the process of “decriminalizing” things. Apparently, and according to Greenwald, it’s quite effective.

Overall, I thought the piece itself was a fair appraisal of the issue at hand. The article that appeared on the CATO website was rather disappointingly devoid of bias, something one gets used to when reading things put out by CATO. It was just the facts. Normally, this works quite well, but as a think tank article, it didn’t quite satisfy like CATO generally does. However, the writing was good enough to make a rather complicated idea quite clear to the layman (me).