As Libertarian Free-marketers, it should come as no surprise that we believe drugs should be decriminalized. In fact, throw all of our free market ideals out of the window and we’d still be clamoring for decriminalization, if not legalization. Since the “War on drugs” in the United States has yielded no tangible results, any efforts to bring drug use to the open are well spent.
Therefore we were glad to read about the success of the Drug Decriminalization efforts in Portugal. When his policy started, in 2001, it was called lunacy by many politicians in the international arena, who predicted drug tourists. We must say, this was of concern to us as well. Switzerland had tried legalization during the last decade, and had attracted drug users from many different areas. We argued that decriminalization policies should occur everywhere simultaneously (realizing the political difficulty, however).
We admit, however, that we have been proven wrong. First of all, the drug tourists, never materialized. 95% of those caught with drugs were Portuguese. Also, drug users used to constitute 56% of HIV cases, while now it’s only 20%. The number of drug dealers has dropped by around 30%.
We should specify that Decriminalization does not mean legalization. It does, however, seem to work.
Full paper available here [PDF] from the Cato Institute.
Reaction from Time:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
Time seems to agree. I think it’s an interesting concept, although its emphasis on “No increase in drug usage” is misplaced (I would think a decrease would be a better goal). Regardless, the usual way of fighting drug usage has had extremely dismal results, so it’s good to find something that seems to work.
Unfortunately it will be some time before the US warms up to an idea like this.