“Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs,Portugal is now having doubts.” That’s the title of a July 7 article in the Washington Post by Anthony Faiola and Catarina Fernandes Martins.
Jeffrey Singer, M.D., who has become one of my go-to experts for examining the drug war, has written a response on the Cato Institute’s Cato at Liberty. It’s quite good.
I’ll hit some highlights of his response, mixed in with my own thoughts.
First, what I found striking is that there’s not a lot of before and after. Normally, you would start to judge a change by looking at how things were before the change. But a lot of the discussion in the article is about how things are now compared to how they were in the first few years after the change. So even if things have deteriorated, by whatever criteria you use, that doesn’t mean they’re worse than before decriminalization. And that comparison, after all, is the relevant one if you’re judging decriminalization.
Here’s the one clear before-and-after comparison I could find:
A newly released national survey suggests the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001, though still below European averages. Portugal’s prevalence of high-risk opioid use is higher than Germany’s, but lower than that of France and Italy. But even proponents of decriminalization here admit that something is going wrong.
Notice that the percent of adults increased by over 60 percent. That, though, doesn’t seem enough of an argument against decriminalization. After all, my prior view, based on the law of demand, is that when the price of something falls, people do more of it. With a lower legal risk of consuming, the price inclusive of risk falls.
Also Jeff Singer points out the following:
In my letter to the editor [of the Washington Post], I argue that the article’s tone suggests the expectation that decriminalization would lead to a drop in illicit drug use. While it did, that was always a secondary goal. The primary goal was to reduce drug overdose deaths by redirecting resources from incarceration to harm reduction. I pointed out that Portugal’s harm reduction efforts have greatly succeeded.
I also pointed out that while overdose deaths increased between 2019 and 2023, for most of those years anxiety, despair, and isolation resulting from pandemic‐related policies caused a worldwide increase in drug use— including alcohol consumption—and sparked overdose deaths. The authors of the Post article didn’t take this into account in their reporting.
It’s really striking that the authors and some of those they interviewed blame some of the problems that have cropped up recently on a change that happened 22 years ago and don’t seem to give any play to a change that happened 3 years ago (Covid and related lockdowns.)
READER COMMENTS
Oscar Cunningham
Jul 20 2023 at 7:47am
From the original article:
It seems like this is a confounding factor. If the government was paying for treatment but then stopped, it’s not surprising things got worse. Of course you could argue that all this is a good thing since the public was saved those 60 million euros, but either way getting less of something when you pay less for it isn’t a failure of legalization.
David Henderson
Jul 20 2023 at 11:51am
Good comments on both issues. Thanks.
steve
Jul 20 2023 at 1:46pm
I have specific concerns about fentanyl but I dont really know how it would balance out if we legalized it. Especially if we took the $43 billion a year we spend now on drug wars and put it into treatment we might well come out ahead so I think I would be happier if we trialed it first. However, it needs to be fairly large. Portugal is a small seaside country. If you legalized it only in some counties in CA, FL, SC or LA I could see a lot of people going there to “party” and you would get results not representative of what would happen if legalized everywhere. People living in Portugal responding to this report claim that is what has happened so I actually feel better about legalization based upon reports from Portugal. I thought it would be worse.
Steve
Walter Boggs
Jul 20 2023 at 3:10pm
I never thought the point of saner drug laws should be to change the number of people who use drugs. That’s supposed to be their private decision. The point, in my mind, has always been to stop the state from destroying people’s lives.
vince
Jul 20 2023 at 4:22pm
Yes, it should be a private decision Steve mentioned the $43 billion spent on drug wars. It’s no longer private.
Mark Z
Jul 20 2023 at 4:26pm
For better or worse, we don’t live in a society that is callous enough or sufficiently committed to individual responsibility to just allow millions of drug addicts die in the streets because of their choices. Public compassion will blunt the negative consequences of drug use and hard drug users will inevitably become an ever growing burden to the taxpayers. That’s why there’s a public interest in keeping the number of addicts down.
vince
Jul 20 2023 at 5:14pm
Yes, the social costs I’m sure go way beyond just the drug wars.
steve
Jul 20 2023 at 6:39pm
Portugal saw some increases in crime and no increases in deaths until 2019-2023 when OD deaths were also increasing everywhere else. I think that is pretty encouraging considering people were coming from all over Europe to use drugs there.
Steve
vince
Jul 20 2023 at 8:32pm
Crimes and deaths are only some of the costs. How much is spent on health care and rehab, paid for by the government or through higher insurance premiums? Then there are the costs to the children–our future–including fetuses of addicted moms. I’m just saying the costs aren’t restricted to the drug user.
Comments are closed.