The true effects of Portuguese decriminalization can be understood only by comparing
post decriminalization usage and trends in Portugal with other EU states, as well as with
non-EU states (such as the United States, Canada, and Australia) that continue to criminalize drugs even for personal usage. And in virtually every category of any significance, Portugal, since decriminalization, has outperformed the vast majority of other states that continue to adhere to a criminalization regime. - Glenn Greenwald, Cato Institute white-paper, 1990
Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. - Abraham Lincoln, 1840
'This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible' - Don Winslow, The Cartel 2015
'While the FDN war is barely a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine—a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.' - Gary Webb, investigative journalist, 1996
'Who are these people? They are the group that is popularly called the Enterprise. They are in and outside [the] CIA. They are mostly Right Wing Republicans, but you will find a mix of Democrats, mercenaries, ex officio Mafia and opportunists within the group. They are CEOs, they are bankers, they are presidents, they own airlines, they own national television networks. They own six of the seven video documentary companies of Washington, DC and they do not give a damn about the law or the Constitution or the Congress or the Oversight committees except as something to be subverted and manipulated and lied to.
They flooded our country with drugs from Central America during the 1980s, cut deals with Haro in Mexico, Noriega in Panama, and the Medellin and Cali cartels, and Castro, and recently the Red Mafia in the KGB.They ruin their detractors and they fear the truth. If they can, they will blackmail you. Sex, drugs, deals, whatever it takes.'
– Former CIA officer and Iran-Contra whistleblower Bruce Hemmings, 1990
Why the decriminalisation of drugs for users works and why the harder the drug, the more important it's decriminalisation is - Portugal 2001,
The following section shows how in Portugal, a decriminalisation of drugs policy implemented in 2001 led to rapid success, and is inspired by Glenn Greenwald's 2009 Cato report titled 'Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies - Drug Decriminalization in Portugal, with the following graphs all from his paper.
First of all it should be noted that prior decrimanalisation of all drugs, drug related deaths were on the rise in Portugal, and that sparked the reforms.
Subsequent to the policy, the ever-increasing trend not only stopped rising but reversed - there were far less drug-related deaths in Portugal, and to many people's surprise those most helped by the new drug laws were heroin users (heroin previously was thought of as the last drug that should be legalised as it is so addictive) and this was most shown by the decrease of HIV in drug users in Portugal as the following three graphs show:
The laws focused on not punishing drug users but providing them support, treatment and education instead, though drug trafficking was still criminalised:
Greenwald writes regarding the new legal process in Portugal - 'Each step of the process is structured so as to de-emphasize or even eliminate any notion of “guilt” from drug usage and instead to emphasize the health and treatment aspects of the process.' The policy not only worked treating heroin users, Greenwald writes that Portugal 'for the 15–64 age group—has the absolute lowest lifetime prevalence rate for cannabis, the most used drug in the EU. Indeed, the majority of EU states have rates that are double and triple the rate for post-decriminalization Portugal. Similarly, for usage rates of cocaine (the second-most commonly used drug in Europe) for the same period and the same age group, only five countries had a lower prevalence rate than the Portuguese rate. Most EU states have double, triple, quadruple, or even higher rates than Portugal’s, including some with the harshest criminalization schemes in the EU.'
Moreover, two decades on, and the statistics still show the Portuguese on average are far safer from fatal drug use, than before the decriminalisation laws were enacted in 2001 when drug deaths per thousand were roughly level with the EU average. It is completely compelling that by 2018, according to the New York Times, Portugal’s number of heroin addicts were a quarter of what they were before the policies were put in place, and startling other countries haven't copied what Portugal have done.
However, if decriminalising drug use and possession for use leads to fewer drug-related deaths, the lives saved from such legal reform would be nothing compared to decriminalising drug trafficking. This is shown clearly by America's 1920-1933 prohibition of alcohol, which nearly doubled the US homicide rate alone (from 6 per 100,00 to 10 per 100,000 in just a dozen years - a 78 percent increase), and this is almost certainly not a co-incidence since when alcohol was legalised again, the homicide rate in the US plummeted again. Moreover, Paul Goldsmith in 1986 studies all drug-related homicides and found that 91% of them were the result of gang-warfare, only 7% were violence provoked by drug use and just 2% were addicts committing crimes to feed their habits.
To demonstrate the point, in Mexico alone, in fifteen years between 2006 and 2021 there were over 350,000 murders attributed to drug trafficking (almost entirely unsolved) and 80,000 people just disappeared, associated with drug traffickers. Those are higher numbers than the Ukrainian War. Without knowing the cause and nature of the global drug trade, society stands no chance of ending such violence.
Why total decriminalization is the future.
1. How the violent war against Mexican cartels backfired and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been saved.
From the offset, post World War II organisations the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been heavily involved as the secret profiteers from the developing world off of the war on drugs, both as dealers and law enforcement, from the days when hundreds of leading traffickers were deported to their homelands instead of serving full sentences in the US after making contacts with leading officials from these organisations. These criminals including leading members of the National Crime Syndicate, such as .Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Silvestro “Silver Dollar Sam” Carolla and Frank Costello, connected with the French Connection and other drug networks all across the world, be they in Mexico, the Middle East or in Europe. Moreover, in Asia all these American security organisations were heavily involved in fighting communism by working with drug traffickers, since heroin was the major commodity in the Asian economy, particularly in China which was ruled by the the Kuomintang (KMT) from 1927-1949, who themselves formed alliances with the Green Gang to monopolise the drug market. But today, how big a deal is drug trafficking in the developing world? Well, a march 2017 report by the Global Financial Integrity found that transnational drug trafficking amounted to $652 billion alone - it is a huge business, and arguably the country where the scale of drug warfare is at the highest has been Mexico for the last two decades.
To understand what's gone on in Mexico, first the widespread notions of a military war against organised and powerful cartels needs to be scrapped. In fact, for almost all the 20th century major drug dealers in Mexico were controlled by the Mexican police, army and governments. The US and especially the CIA interfered as their national security policy revolved around anti-communism, and the 1947 National Security Act restructured all their goals towards that. Noam Chomsky in 1986 wrote that considered the US national security policy in Central America during the Cold War 'a system of global management'. So just like in Asia, where drug traffickers were utilised as political agents against communism, the likes of Caro Quintero and Félix Gallardo ended up participating in Cold War efforts on Mexican soil in coordination with the CIA to help the Contras' cocaine trafficking operations and thereby finance the rebels against the left-wing Sandinista regime. In fact, famous drug-lord Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela said publicly that the Cali Cartel he supposedly led, of which there was a whole Netflix series about, did not even exist, telling the Times that -
'It’s an invention of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] ... There are many groups, not just one cartel. The police and the DEA know. But they prefer to invent a monolithic enemy.' 'Cartels do not exist. What you have is a collection of drug traffickers. Sometimes, they work together, and sometimes they don’t. American prosecutors just call them cartels to make it easier to make their cases. It is all part of the game.'
In Mexico, cartels were heavily controlled by governmental officials in the 1970s and 1980s, when supposed Narco legends emerged. As Oswaldo Zavala author of the 2022 book 'Drug Cartels do no exist' tells 'the best-known traffickers in the ’70s—Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carillo, Rafael Caro Quintero—had intimate relationships with government officials. Félix Gallardo was always dining with Mexican authorities in famous restaurants.' However, it was only in the 21st century that truly tremendous bloodshed occurred, associated with drug trafficking and Narcos. The questions which Zavela brings to mind are - why create the terror of an enemy that couldn't be controlled and which never really existed, and what was the cost of doings? Another author, Charles Bowden (author of Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields) answers the first question - 'the war is for drugs, for the enormous money to be made in drugs, where the police and the military fight for their share, where the press is restrained by the murder of reporters and feasts on a steady diet of bribes, and where the line between government and the drug world has never existed.' The second question, the cost of militarisation was most revealed by sociologist Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, showing 'that the country’s violence began after the militarization ordered by Calderón in 2008. In the previous decade, between 1997 and 2007, the homicide rate was in fact decreasing in the country’s main cities, including Ciudad Juárez. Violence only returned in those areas of the country where Calderón sent thousands of soldiers and federal agents.'
The war against Narco's was actually a war on the poor, and the military most involved were absolutely lethal and completely let off the hook by a terrorised and bribed media. Zavala writes 'starting in 2008, with Army and Federal Police intervention, the murder rate in various areas of the country increased by up to 1,000 percent. A study by the think tank México Evalúa shows that most of these victims were lower class men with minimal education, between twenty and forty years of age...A study conducted by the Drug Policy Program at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE, in Spanish) showed that the armed forces’ rate of lethality grew dramatically during the War on Drugs ordered by Calderón. Between 2007 and 2011, according to the study, 86.1 percent of murdered civilians who allegedly confronted the Army and federal police were killed with “perfect lethality,” that is, in confrontations where all enemy combatants were killed with no survivors left. All this without Federal Ministerial Police investigations that could prove that the murdered civilians had some link to “organized crime.” The Mexican Navy has the highest lethality rate: 17.3 deaths for every civilian injured. This is followed by the Mexican Army with 9.1 deaths per injury and then the Federal Police with 2.6 deaths per injury. CIDE researchers also point out that violence increases by 6 percent with each combat and over a period of three months. And even more serious: of the 3,327 documented clashes, 84 percent were actually caused by the Mexican Armed Forces. Only 7 percent were direct attacks against the Mexican Armed Forces. Alejandro Madrazo, one of the CIDE researchers, interprets the data unambiguously: “The high lethality and perfect lethality levels are a very strong indication that we are facing extrajudicial executions or the excessive use of public force.'
'Moreover, any talk of there being an ounce of hard justice in the war against cartels is absurd as there is no justice to begin with. Consider the state of Chihuahua for instance, 'where less than 2 percent of crimes are even solved', how would it be possible for authorities to 'have had the ability to correctly determine the guilt of the more than 15,000 presumed murdered narcos when most of the bodies were not even identified and ended up discarded in mass graves.' Since 98% of crimes are unsolved and the military have been documented as almost always the aggressors, it is impossible to defend authorities for such levels of bloodshed. Finally. Zavela explains how one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Ciudad Juárez , shows exactly how faulty giving power to the military was, revealing that in '2007, Ciudad Juárez registered 320 murders, a figure below the average sustained between 1993 and 2007 with just 0.7 murders per day. After the arrival of the army and the federal police on March 28, 2007, murders increased to more than 1,623 in 2008 (4.4 daily), 2,754 in 2009 (7.5 daily), 3,622 in 2010 (9.9 daily) and finally with a decrease to 2,086 in 2011 (5.7 daily). Thus, at least 10,085 of the more than 121,000 homicides recorded during Calderón’s war occurred in Ciudad Juárez.' Why was such evil policy permitted - a lack of media coverage was a big issue. According to human rights organization Article 19 'seven out of ten attacks against journalists in Mexico are perpetrated by state agents'. The real answer is that former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador intial policy against drug cartels - "hugs, not bullets" was not at all the madness that the media painted.
2. The criminalisation of drugs leads to mafia, black market and simply fails, lessons from America's 1920-1933 Prohibition
When the Federal government imposed a prohibition on alcohol in 1920 on US citizens, it created a violent disaster that failed in achieving even its own original goal. For the consumer, alcohol became far more dangerous and within five years, over four times as many people died from poisoned liquor (in 1925 the national toll was 4,154 as compared to 1,064 in 1920). Consumption only decreased initially but then it rose again steadily, and according to a paper titled 'Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition' by the National Bureau of Economic Research 'in the latter years of Prohibition, cirrhosis, drunkenness and psychosis estimate consumption to be 50 to 70 percent of its pre-Prohibition value while alcoholism estimates small increases in consumption... Claims either that consumption during Prohibition increased significantly or that it fell to a small fraction of previous usage can be patently rejected.' The impact of prohibition on crime was immediate - 'arrests for drunkenness and disorderly conduct increased 41 percent, and arrests of drunken drivers increased 81 percent... According to a study of 30 major U.S. cities, the number of crimes increased 24 percent between 1920 and 1921'. Moreover, bootlegging led to the establishment of American organized crime, which persisted long after the repeal of Prohibition. As aforementioned, the US homicide rate increased around 80 percent whilst prohibition took place, and fell after alcohol was legalised again.
The criminalisation and critique of drugs is more a fanatical project made by governments in order to control people than one based on science; be it marijuana, alcohol, psychedelics, ecstasy or ayahuasca all have been documented to be actually healthy for the human mind. In short, the science says the opposite to what the politicians and mainstream healthcare say and the criminalisation of drugs makes the more dangerous drugs like heroin, far less pure and far less healthy, whilst the implementation of drug laws sees many hundreds of thousands die. It has been estimated that 85% of the prison population has an active substance use disorder or were incarcerated for a crime involving drugs or drug use in the US - so drugs are linked heavily to crime. For crime to go down, drugs must be legalised and drug addicts rehabilitated not punished, as the opposite strict anti-drug approach has completely failed and it's crystal clear will never work.
Reference
(1)Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies, Glenn Greenwald, 2009 https://www.cato.org/white-paper/drug-decriminalization-portugal-lessons-creating-fair-successful-drug-policies#
(2) Drug Cartels Do Not Exist, Oswaldo Zavala, 2022
(3) Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition, National Bureau of Investigation, 1991
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