Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (47 page)

One afternoon, in the heroin clinic in Geneva, I told one of the psychiatrists there, Dr. Manghi, about how this story had all happened before, long ago, in Los Angeles. Heroin was prescribed; people got better; then it was shut down. Then again, much later, in Liverpool: heroin was prescribed; people got better; then it was shut down. She stroked her wooden necklace, thinking.

“It’s like relapse in addiction,” she said. “It might look discouraging. But at every relapse, you learn something new.”

Chapter 16

The Spirit of ’74

I had known for years that there was a country where all drugs—from cannabis to crack—were decriminalized in 2001. I wanted to understand what that meant, but I held off from visiting until nearly two years into this journey. I told myself it was because I wanted to end the story on an upbeat note: Here, dear reader, is the solution. But there was also another reason, one that I admitted to myself only in low moments. What if I go to see the alternative, and it doesn’t work? What then?

In 2013, I touched down in a sun-washed winter in Portugal to travel through this land of decriminalized drugs. I started by walking the streets of Lisbon for days, and I think I expected to see something different. Boys and girls sauntered hand in hand up and down the seven hills on which this capital city is built, through tiny jagged irrational medieval streets leading nowhere, and through vast straight rational avenidas that stretch to the sea. They sat out in the street drinking coffee and eating more cakes than seems possible for people with such slim waists and slimmer wallets.

The people there live in small brightly colored apartment blocks that stare across the avenidas and alleyways at each other, and from any window you can see into half a dozen homes. Underwear hangs from loosely strung wire to dry, where everyone can see it, unembarrassed, un-English. The people of Lisbon have a relaxed gaze, but it is always present, sipping its coffee, seeing you.

In his anonymous little office in an official building, I met a man named João Goulão. He was wearing a brown suit and a brown tie, and he still spoke in the precise manner of the family doctor he was for so long. He was mild and rather conservative in demeanor—and yet he had led the biggest ever break in Harry Anslinger’s global system. He was insistent on sharing credit and deflecting praise, but most people believe he pioneered the transformation here. Over a series of conversations, he—and many other participants in the Portuguese drug revolution—told me how they did it, and why.

A nineteen-year-old university student was flicking through a medical textbook in Portugal in 1973 when he found a secret message. It was written on tissue paper. Somebody had slipped it there and then vanished. João Goulão read the message carefully.

It was an underground newspaper, demanding a revolution. João knew if he was found with these words, the secret police would come for him, and he would vanish. He had seen signs across the university campus, demanding the return of students who had been “disappeared.” On the rare occasions when people organized a protest, the police unleashed their dogs and their batons, and more people vanished.

A few days later, another student said to João: “Did you find something new in your book?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What do you think about it?”

“I think we must be very careful,” João replied. But he added: “I enjoyed what I read.”

“I can give you more of those papers discreetly if you want.”

And so João became a small part of the movement to free Portugal. This is not what his family expected of him. He grew up traveling in the 1950s and 1960s around the silenced interior of the country, moving from place to place through the dry rural heartland of the dictatorship. His father was an engineer whose job was to clear people off their land against their will, to make way for the dams that the government and the electrical companies wanted to build. He was not popular. He carried a gun.

João’s family unquestioningly believed the regime propaganda that evil forces were trying to take over the country and destroy everything they knew. Where he grew up, nobody talked about politics beyond a smattering of vague clichés expressing this conviction, muttered to ward off more dangerous thoughts. He had “just a vague [sense] that we had political police [and] that some people were missing. There was no discussion of it. It was a taboo.”

Now, after coming to the big city to study, he was learning the truth. At a bus stop, he asked one of his underground comrades about one of the articles he had read in the secret newspaper, and his friend responded by talking loudly about football. João was confused. Later, his friend told him: “Someone from the political police was . . . getting close to us. To listen to our conversation.”

João knew something was being prepared—he heard whispers—but he didn’t know when it would come.

In the early hours of the morning
¹
of the twenty-fifth of April 1974, João’s brother-in-law, an officer in the Portuguese army, called his wife with a message that surprised her. We have been plotting a revolution. It is here. We have begun. Tanks were already rolling through Lisbon toward the treasury in the center of the city. The authorities ordered people
²
to stay off the streets, and the radio played only marching music in a constant loop. But João, like tens of thousands of others, headed straight to the town center that morning. It was cold, and the city was holding its breath. João saw a boat on the river pointing its cannons at the Governmental Palace. He saw military columns on the street. In the narrow cavernous roads of Lisbon, the tanks look enormous and outsized, with machine guns pointing outward.

Then there came the moment when João, and all the people standing on the streets alongside him, knew they were not going to be fired at by their country’s military—not ever again. The tanks rolling through the city paused when they met with an old lady who was setting up her flower stall. She smiled and gently tossed a single red carnation
³
at the tank commander. By the afternoon, young girls had begun to approach the soldiers and place their own red carnations in the barrels of their guns. It was the moment when the Portuguese people lost their fear. People climbed onto the tanks
⁴
and danced on them. The dictatorship was over.

In the months that followed, there was an eruption of debates and demonstrations and an unleashing of all the pent-up hopes of decades gone by—a festival of democracy. It was as though the dams his father built all those years had burst, all at once.

And so Portugal was learning a lesson that would flood into this story. Nothing has to stay the same. If a dogma is not working, no matter how strong and immovable it seems, you can cast it aside it and start anew. Two and a half decades later, at the start of the twenty-first century, João helped lead Portugal to do something remarkable, and unprecedented. “It is,” he tells me when we meet in 2013, the “result of all the processes that began in ’74,” the day he saw flowers overwhelm a tyranny.

The Algarve stumbled from the sealed-off silence of the dictatorship into a head-banging 24/7 beach party. The southern shores of Portugal are dreamscapes of yellow sand, yellow sun, and blue waters, but they were effectively shut away from the world’s tourists by the old regime for fifty years. By the 1980s, however, tourists from across Europe were cooking themselves by day and downing vodka by night on its shores. João was a family doctor by then, and he saw that for a few months of the year, all the locals made pillows of cash and joyfully joined in the sozzled international conga line of tourists, making it the high season in every sense. Then the tourists would go home, and the Algarve would be left empty and jobless.

It created a bipolar region, where collective mania was followed by collective depression. “Of course I saw many people using ecstasy, cocaine, and so on—party drugs—but the big problems of addiction,” he explains, “were through heroin.” It was by trying to solve this problem that João may have stumbled onto another part of the solution to drug prohibition. This is his story as it was told to me in 2013 by João himself, his colleagues in the Portuguese drug treatment sector, several addicts he has treated, and the news reports about him.

Portugal had, by the 1980s, one of the worst heroin addiction problems in the world. One day, a young musician and poet named Vitor came into João’s office. He was “a very intelligent guy,” João recalls, “very sensitive, [and] we had big discussions.” The young man believed that drugs unleashed his potential to create art. João disagreed, and over time, in the midst of this great national spike in heroin use, he successfully persuaded Vitor to lay down the needle, and he watched him achieve a “wonderful recovery” that served as an example to the people around him.

And then, two years later, Vitor came back to João with a mysterious illness. He died at the age of twenty-three. “It was very tragic,” João tells me. “Yesterday, his mother called me, just to wish [me] a good season. Every year, before Christmas, his mother calls me, and she starts crying.”

Portugal had virtually no experience with these drugs before this. The 1960s were canceled here
⁵
by the dictatorship, so the country was starting with a blank slate on drug policy. While the use of drugs like cannabis and cocaine was low by international standards, the use of heroin
⁶
was off the charts and rising. The government was desperate to respond—and the international prohibitionist playbook was waiting for them. It offered a clear recipe: criminalization, crackdowns, punishment. Portugal adopted it all enthusiastically.

But, to their puzzlement, the problem just kept getting worse. João was seeing more and more heroin addicts in his practice, and more and more AIDS cases. “Heroin use started among marginalized people but then it came to middle classes and even high classes,” he says. “At that time it was almost impossible to find one Portuguese family that had no problems inside the family or in the close neighborhood.” By the early 1990s,
⁷
fully one in one hundred people in the country were addicted to smack.

People were scared to come forward for help, even when medical services were offered. Often, addicts stumbled into João’s clinic in a desperate state but refused to give their last names or any contact information. They knew there was a war on, and they were the enemy.

“We were out of options,”
⁸
João told one journalist about this period. “We were spending millions and getting nowhere.” So he set up the first drug treatment center in the Algarve’s history, based on the belief that addicts need help, not contempt. His teams treated hundreds of patients, and they began to observe what works, and what doesn’t. So in 1997, he was put in charge of the treatment of addicts for the whole country, and in 1999, he was asked by the government to serve on an independent commission made up of nine doctors and judges, with an impartial academic researcher as the chair, to draw up a comprehensive plan to really deal with the drug problem.

They had free rein to think this problem through, starting from scratch. This meant they could acknowledge some fairly obvious facts that had long been ignored in most countries. The first was that the overwhelming majority of adult drug users had no problem: they used for pleasure and did not become addicts. The authorities, they decided, need not concern themselves with these people, except to offer safety advice. The second point was that when it came to addicts, the country had already tried, João says, the “terroristic” approach pioneered by Anslinger: threaten drug addicts and impose severe pain on them if they continue. In his experience at his clinic, this was “the best way to make them wish to keep using drugs. To deal with it by chaining, by humiliating—it’s the best way to make them angry with the system, to not to wish to be normal.”