Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (50 page)

In a classroom full of Portuguese
²³
sixteen-year-olds at the Romeu Correia High School, we are watching as a girl named Sabrina is offered her first taste of cocaine. She is tall and lean and gorgeous and she wants to be a supermodel. The man offering the white powder is in his twenties, handsome and seductive. The class is discussing what she should do. Should she go with him? Should she snort it?

These are the children of the drug revolution. They were five years old when all drugs were decriminalized, so they have never known the drug war.

For many people of my generation growing up in the 1980s, drug education consisted mainly of being told that if you tried drugs, your life would be ruined, and that was that. As soon as you smoked your first spliff and survived, you dismissed your teachers as liars on the issue of drugs, and you stopped listening—even to the parts you needed to hear. As Portugal changed its drug laws, it was also in the process of abandoning Just Say No prevention programs and replacing them with something radically different.

The teacher, Luz Baiao, explains to these kids that they can discuss their thoughts about what Sabrina should do candidly. Since what they are talking about hasn’t been a criminal offense any time they can remember, they seem to take that for granted. They are staring at the whiteboard, where this scenario has been projected for them to talk about.

It would be very risky to use this drug, one of the kids says, because it is more addictive than the marijuana he has tried a few times at parties with his friends. All of life is risk, another boy says, rebutting him. Yes, a girl replies, but that’s no reason to take risks unnecessarily.

The class giggles a little at the subject matter, but they seem engaged. This is clearly a conversation that takes place between teenagers everywhere. I can remember how we would have it when I was that age—on buses, in the park, at parties—but we were alone, with only our own ignorance to reflect back at each other.

Luz mediates neutrally. She listens. She doesn’t ever look judgmental, or shocked. So when she refers to the real risks involved in taking this drug, the kids seem to listen, precisely because she is not pretending it is the whole picture.

After a debate, the class reaches the conclusion that Sabrina would be foolish to use the cocaine, and they vote for her to say no. They reach this conclusion on their own. They are not, I think, trying to please their teacher. They are expressing their own thoughts. The social disapproval of hard drugs didn’t die with the old drug laws. Indeed, it may be stronger now, since there’s no rebellion in drug use anymore.

This approach brings teenage decisions into discussion with the adult world, instead of pretending they don’t exist. In Portugal, the dilemmas of teenage life aren’t playing out in a sealed-off cocoon of adolescence: they play out in conversation with parents and teachers and the guidance they can offer. After criminalization ends, a new, more candid conversation can begin.

It occurs to me as I watch the students that the philosophy expressed in these lessons runs through all the reforms in the country since 2001. Prohibition is based on externally preventing people from using drugs through fear and force; the Portuguese alternative is based on the belief that drugs aren’t going away, so you need instead to give people the internal tools—the confidence, the knowledge, the support—to make the right decisions for themselves.

The school bell rings and the kids shuffle out of the classroom. They have, I realize, had honest conversations with adults, in place of the boo-and-hiss pantomime my generation was offered.

This is the kind of mature approach liberals have been advocating for years. But there is a strange anxiety in seeing your proposals put into practice. What if they fail? What if we end the drug war, and drug use explodes? What if punishing people really does keep large numbers of people sober? What if more people end up, like too many of the people I love, addicted? What if you saw other disasters start to emerge—ones I can’t even predict now?

One man, more than any other, issued this warning before Portugal began its drug revolution. His name is João Figueira, and he is the chief of the Lisbon Drugs Squad, the closest equivalent in Portugal to the head of the DEA, or the chief inspector of Scotland Yard’s Narcotics Division. He is a carefully spoken, mild-mannered man with an enormous mustache of a type unseen outside the pages of late Victorian fiction. He greets me in a dim police station corridor where the yellow fluorescent lighting makes the walls look sickly, and we squeeze into an arthritic elevator to reach his office.

His concerns at the time of decriminalization spoke for many people in Portugal. As we saw earlier, he warned that once the criminal penalties were lifted, “we could have an explosion of consumption . . . [where] lots of people start consuming, and then we lose control of the situation.”

More than anyone else in the country, his men saw the changes on the streets, up close, and immediate. It was a fear that—if we are totally candid—some of us in the drug reform movement shared.

So João Figueira watched the results happen in real time, very closely, expecting vindication.

And he found something else.

“The things we were afraid of,” he says, “didn’t happen.” Two highly respected and impartial bodies have studied the outcomes: the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), and the
British Journal of Criminology
. They have no horse in this race. Their role is solely to figure out what actually happened.

They discovered there has been a slight increase in overall drug use, from 3.4 to 3.7 percent
²⁴
of the population.

But Portugal started with a low rate of use, except for heroin, and it stayed low compared to other countries. The EMCDDA found Portugal
²⁵
is ninth lowest out of twenty-eight European countries when it comes to cannabis use, fifth lowest when it comes to amphetamines, and fifth lowest when it comes to ecstasy. Over a decade after full decriminalization, Portugal has, they found, “a level of drug use that is, on the whole, below the European average and much lower than its only European neighbor, Spain.”

But what about the three forms of drug use that the prohibitionists understandably offer as the reason why we must continue fighting the drug war—addiction, deaths due to drug use, and teenage drug use? These figures were collected carefully.

The Portuguese Ministry of Health says that the number of problematic drug users has literally been halved, from a hundred thousand to fifty thousand. The
British Journal of Criminology
²⁶
confirms it is down, but found a more modest decline, from 7.6 people per thousand to 6.8, while confirming that injecting drug use has indeed been almost halved, from 3.5 injectors per thousand people to 2. When they compared the situation to the nearby countries of Spain and Italy, which are still waging the drug war, they found that “Portugal is the only of these nations to have exhibited declines” in problematic drug use.

So there are fewer addicts after decriminalization. At the same time, the
British Journal of Criminology
found that overdose has been “reduced significantly,” and the proportion of people contracting HIV who get it from drug use has fallen from 52 percent to 20 percent.
²⁷
This means that fewer young people like Vitor—the musician whom João sat in his clinic in the Algarve having long conversations with, at the birth of this transformation—are getting sick.

Figueira thinks he knows why all this has happened. It is, he tells me, because “we don’t see a drug addict as a [criminal] anymore. He’s someone that needs help. And everyone thinks it. Then they consider themselves sick people—they don’t consider themselves [to be] against the society. It’s a big change.” It means that now, “they are not marginalized. They are just like a traffic accident. They are not on the other side of the line. They are regular citizens. They have a problem.”

In the old days, he says, when somebody you knew became an alcoholic, “we treated those guys as friends—they need[ed] help,” not abuse. He now realizes “drug consumers are on exactly the same level . . . In fact, it is exactly the same situation. It is a sickness that needs to be treated.” Now, instead of being hounded to the gutter, they are helped to a hospital. In the years since heroin was decriminalized in Portugal, its use has been halved there—while in the United States, where the drug war continues, it has doubled.
²⁸

But what, I found myself worrying, about teenagers? Are the kids in Luz’s class more or less likely to use drugs than my nephews and niece? They are the most vulnerable group, because an increase in use there would affect their brain chemistry for the rest of their lives.

“Children aged 15–16
²⁹
[in Portugal] also reported one of the lowest lifetime prevalence of cannabis use in Western Europe
(13 percent),” the EMCDDA found, while their level of cocaine use is almost half the EU average. It is slightly down since decriminalization started: in 1999, 2.5 percent of sixteen-to-eighteen-year-olds used heroin. By 2005, after six years of this model of decriminalization, it was down to 1.8 percent.
³⁰
“I spent a lot of time on the streets walking and arresting consumers,” João Figueira says, and he believed in it—so he describes what he sees on the streets now with a tone of mild amazement.

He stresses that the new drug policy has brought a transformation, too, in the lives of people who have never once touched a drug. It was “very common” before the end of the drug war that heroin addicts would rob people to get their next fix, he says, but the “crimes related to drug consumption are now finished. It doesn’t happen. The crimes on street level related to drug consumption—there aren’t [any] anymore.” They are all either on methadone, in treatment, or recovering, so “they don’t need to rob cars or assault people.” He adds: “This is a complete change.”

And this change has caused another transformation—in how people see the police. “I don’t think [people in poor neighborhoods] see the police now as enemies. I think this is important. This is different.” I think of Leigh Maddox back in Baltimore, and how she told me this would happen after the end of the drug war. This in turn, Figueira says, makes investigating all forms of crime easier: “We spare lots of resources, human resources, paperwork, money” to go after real criminals. In the past, he spent his time “arresting consumers without any result.” Now, he says, “there are results.”

He is careful to add one caveat: These results are not due to the change in the law alone. The heroin use in the 1980s and 1990s was so widespread and so damaging that it spurred a backlash among young people who looked at their older siblings and resolved never to follow those particular track marks to disaster. So some of these changes would have happened even without the transformation in the drug laws—but not, he is confident, all of it.

João Figueira describes himself as “very conservative.” At first, he says, when the laws were changed, “the left wing said ‘let’s do this’ and the right wing said ‘no, no, no’—and in fact on the results we have, there is no kind of ideological [debate anymore] because it has nothing to do with ideology. What happened here worked,” he explains. “What happened here was a good result and the statistics we have prove it. There is no ideology in this . . . Now everyone, conservatives or socialists, accepts the situation.” Since the drug policy revolution, Portugal has had two governments of the left, and two governments of the right. All have kept the decriminalization in place. None of the political parties wants to go back.