Why Europe's Heroin Capital Decriminalized All Drugs

30 years ago Portugal was in the midst of one of the worst opioid epidemics in European history with one percent of the population addicted to heroin and hundreds of people dying from overdose every year Portugal was known as the heroin capital of Europe and despite two decades of waging a War on Drugs it was fighting a losing battle as the craziness was getting worse and worse every year and then Portugal took a radical and an unprecedented step from one year to another it completely changed everything it was doing and it decided to fight drugs in a way that no other country has really tried before since then the Portuguese strategy has been celebrated as one of the most successful attempts to fight addiction and drug abuse but what did Portugal actually do how successful it really was and could it be a recipe for other countries like the United States that are struggling with opioid and Drug epidemics of their own this is how Portugal sold its opioid crisis now drug addiction is a fairly controversial topic and getting the right picture can be tricky because of all the media bias around it but now there is a tool that you can use to see past that and get a more transparent and balanced view on this or any other topic called Ground news ground news is a news comparison website that can help you get a feeling for how different news outlets report on various issues with any given article you can see which sources report on it the most whether there is a political bias and how the reporting of sources on the left and right differ you can follow entire topics see through the bias of individual outlets and get information on the factuality of each Source their ownership and location personally I consume a ton of news both for researching my videos but also just in my everyday life and ground news is a great way to get the full picture of what's happening and break outside of your own bubble and you can sign up and try the service for free using the link in the description thank you ground news for sponsoring this video and now back to our topic but to understand first we need to explain how Portugal got there in the first place since the 1920s Portugal has been ruled by a right-wing dictatorship and even though the country was a colonial power the Continental Portugal was relatively isolated from the rest of Europe the government exercised strict control over the borders over the economy and over what can be imported into the country and so for decades you couldn't even buy a Coca-Cola since the Portuguese dictator considered it a highly addictive drug and unsurprisingly real drugs common in the west were basically non-existent but in the 1970s everything changed the dictatorship has fallen and Portugal transitioned to a democracy opening up to the world and integrating into the European economy and while that had many upsides it also brought one unexpected problem suddenly Portugal was overwhelmed with large amounts of drugs that were being smuggled into to the country and the new Democratic state had no experience and no tools to fight back within a few years the situation became critical and 30 years before the U.S Portugal had fallen headfirst into a major opioid crisis and the Portuguese drug of choice became heroin one of the most damaging and addictive substances you can put into your Bot in the 1980s and 1990s Portugal became famous as the heroin capital of Europe as the drug established itself in the country in record-breaking levels in the 1990s one percent of the population was addicted to it a rate more than two times higher than in the U.S today and since heroin is most commonly injected with a needle the rate of HIV in the country skyrocketed and Portugal soon had the highest HIV rate in the entire European union soon people shooting heroin out in the public became a common sight in Portuguese cities and so the government declared the heroin epidemic and major crisis and responded in a way that may seem very familiar by declaring a War on Drugs the government decided to focus on repression introducing increasingly harsh policies and strict punishments for using and holding any amount of any illegal substance and since drug users were seen and treated as criminals who deserve harsh treatment soon enough prisons started filling up with drug addicts by late 1990s half of the people in Portuguese prisons were there for drug-related reasons and as a result the prison population was constantly growing but despite the repressive policies the problem was not getting any better and if anything the heroin epidemic was getting worse and worse Portugal's approach was clearly not working but then something has changed in 1998 Portugal assembled a panel of experts to evaluate how effective the War on Drugs actually is why it's not working and what should be done next and their conclusion was that it's not effective at all and that poor your goal should do a complete reversal of its drug policy and while this has been recommended to other countries before in Portugal it actually happened and in 2001 it adopted a new National Drug strategy that completely changed its approach to fighting the drug epidemic so what did they actually do well before Portugal wasn't differentiating between users and dealers people who are addicted and people who make huge profits from supplying the drugs both were treated as criminals but it was mostly the addicts who got caught and who would end up in prison but who then got out started using again and ended up back in prison soon after to break this cycle the first major change that Portugal adopted was decriminalization of every single illegal substance now that doesn't mean that they would become legal you couldn't legally buy the drugs anywhere but using the drugs unlike selling them was not a criminal offense anymore dealers would still get arrested and go to prison but if you were caught with less than a 10-day Supply of any drug which would be considered an amount for personal use you were instead sent to a dissuation committee these committees spread all around the country where a unique Portuguese invention and a crucial part of the reform they were made up by a local psychiatrist a social worker and an attorney and the idea was that the drug users were not meant to be punished but rather dissuaded from continuing their drug habit to do that the Committees would evaluate the level of drug abuse and addiction of the individual inform them about the dangers of what they're doing and what the options for addiction treatment there are and then decide on what to do next in most cases they would order the drug user to go to a mandatory drug addiction treatment and periodically report to the committee but they could also use sanctions like fines or taking away people's professional license but while this was a major change it wouldn't be possible without the second part of the reform which was the decision to start providing free a day addiction treatment to anyone who needed it this treatment was available all over the country in both government and non-government centers that were offering social and psychological support substance addiction programs and heroin substitutions like methadone and all of that would be completed with a policy of so-called harm reduction aimed at fighting the growing HIV epidemic among drug users by giving out clean needles so that if someone was gonna do drugs anyway they could at least do it in a way that was less damaging to themselves the idea was that if your goal is really to reduce the number of drug addicts it doesn't make sense to lock them up especially if they're people who are in most cases not violent or dangerous to the society what do you want to instead is to get them to a treatment and by making it widely available and removing the threat of a criminal offense you make people more willing to do that and even though it costs money giving people free addiction treatment is still a lot cheaper than keeping them in prison but how successful all of that really was and would any of it be applicable anywhere else well there is a bit of a tendency to paint Portugal's strategy as a clear success and an obvious example to follow but the reality is a bit more complicated on one hand you could say it was pretty successful after 20 years of this new strategy there are significantly less people in prison for drug-related reasons the HIV rates dropped by 90 percent overdose deaths are lower than the European average and the percentage of people addicted to heroin and other high-risk opioids fell from one percent to about a quarter of that and the use of drugs is among the lowest in Europe but as good result as it is the problem didn't disappear entirely there are still people addicted to high-risk drugs and dying from overdose and while the percentage of people in prison for drug-related reasons is much lower in Portugal than it used to be it's still about 15 to 20 percent which is actually the same as in the US today in other words the new strata strategy didn't solve the problem not even close but it did stop the crisis and it turned it from an epidemic to a manageable issue but can it be applied elsewhere like in the US which is deep in its own opioid epidemic kainan where Portugal was in the 1990s well yes and no on one hand the problems that Portugal was dealing with were kind of different from the United States of today and so it's not clear if the Portuguese strategy would be a good fit unlike Portugal in the 90s the US has been moving away from its traditional War on Drugs approach for quite some time already today about 20 of the U.S prison population is locked up for drug reasons which is basically the same number as Portugal after decriminalization the US also doesn't have a major HIV problem and the reason for its opioid epidemic is not just because of illegal drugs like heroin but also because of legal prescription opioids and painkillers like Oxycontin and Fentanyl but there are a few things in which the U.S could take massive inspiration from Portugal and most importantly it's the access to addiction treatment the thing is that even if the U.S adopted the idea of dissuation committees most likely it wouldn't really work because the key requirement was a freely and widely available drug addiction treatment accessible to people across the country and from all kinds of Social and economic backgrounds in the U.S has some massive issues in this area Based on data from the national survey on drug use there are over 300 000 people in the U.S who need drug addiction treatment but can't get it because they either don't have insurance or they do have one but they can't afford it anyway because an addiction treatment is not covered by it in a way addiction treatment in the U.S is a business much more than a public service which is completely different to Portugal and many other European countries where this kind of treatment is fully subsidized by the state and provided to the public for free the problem is that while the U.S admits that it has an epidemic of addiction it doesn't invest into the one thing that can help accessible addiction treatment without which you can't really expect anything to change and that's where the real inspiration for the United States or actually any other country really is

Channel: Explained with Dom

Views: 25,310

Keywords: how portugal solved an opioid crisis, opioid crisis, opioid epidemic

Id: leQGMCs9lAU

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023