I was reading a travel magazine and came across an article about drug policies in Portugal. What they've done in Portugal is to decriminalize all drugs-including heroin and cocaine. Which is not the same thing as making drugs legal.
That doesn't mean that drug trafficking is legal. Decriminalization means that one may have any drug on their person as long as it's for personal use.
When a person is found in possession of a personal use amount they're referred to a "Dissuasion Panel," a board made of of social workers, and people from the medical and legal community for assistance in dealing with their addiction. Jail is not part of the program when users are in possession of an amount for personal use.
When I talked to a few people about this they thought it was a bad idea. Crime would be up. Young people would be encouraged to start using. Ghettoes would pop up.
But depending on what surveys you read, Portugal has the least crime of any country in the world after New Zealand and Iceland.
And one of the reasons they don't have the problems there that we have in the U.S. is that drugs in Portugal are treated as a medical problem, not as a moral or political issue.
Since I've been a child I have heard the mantra "war on drugs." But, I've never seen us win any of the battles in this war. We put people in jail. We have armies of Federal and local police. We have more prisons than any country in the world and are building more.
We support the criminal underworld in South American and Asian countries. We have made zero progress in the war on drugs.
And as proof of that more Americans died from Fentanyl than from any other cause this last year in our country. Yeah, we're winning all right.
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