When you look at Portugal, you look at what some other, well,
would we tackle this better if we legalized it and regulated it?
And I know that seems like a crazy notion.
>> Of course, look I- >> But
you look at some of the outcomes in Portugal and you think, well,
maybe it's not so crazy.
>> So I think Portugal is a very different country.
And in fact,
if you look at some of the strategies that have been tried in Portugal,
some of them have been tried in certain municipalities in the United States.
And what you end up seeing is drug overdose numbers go up,
addiction numbers go up.
So, I think if the Portugal approach could work here, it would have, frankly,
already worked.
>> That was Republican Senator J.D Vance from Ohio making the case that while
drug decriminalization worked in Portugal,
similar models have not worked out so well in the United States.
Now, look, considering the pretty brutal spikes in overdoses and
deaths in America each year, I was ready to at least hear him out.
But he actually might be getting something wrong.
In fact, we might all be getting something wrong.
Okay, let's watch more, and I'll explain what I mean.
>> Look, some harm reduction absolutely matters, right?
Suboxone to sort of medically assisted treatment for people who are trying to
break clean of this stuff, all that's part of the equation.
But I think that if we believe we're gonna solve the opioid problem by handing out
needles, we're gonna make the problem worse.
And in fact, we're already seeing evidence that we've done this.
So, no, I don't think that's the solution, but I do think that we should follow
the evidence wherever it ultimately leads here.
Legalization is not gonna help, but maybe doing medically assisted treatment
more and making that more accessible, that's a good solution.
>> Look at J.D Vance mentioning Suboxone and
medical treatments to help people who are suffering with addictions.
It's incredible.
Can we just address his tone and how much Vance has moderated his
messaging since running in the GOP primary for his Senate seat in Ohio?
He even seems open to doing more than just locking people up for drug abuse.
And he seems willing to admit that the model worked in Portugal.
But as I was researching this story,
I was actually shocked to find that tides are turning in Portugal,
and their much lauded drug reforms are beginning to show cracks and weaknesses.
Okay, so let's go back and
refresh our memories of how Portugal reformed their drug laws.
Back in 2001, Portugal ended punitive drug policies and
instead decriminalized consumption of all drugs for personal use.
Consumption remains technically against the law, but instead of jail, people who
misuse drugs are registered by police and referred to dissuasion commissions.
For the most troubled people, authorities can impose sanctions,
including fines and recommend treatment.
The decision to attend, though, is voluntary.
So the so called harm reduction model was born.
That's what happened in Portugal, and the initial results were absolutely promising.
In fact, TYT covered Portugal's success story many, many times.
Here's one example from 2012.
>> And back in 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs.
Now, we've talked to you about the Portuguese experiment before,
and that it seemed that it was going well with the numbers.
Well, a new report is out after 11 years of this experiment.
How has it gone so far?
Well, the numbers are in, and they are astounding.
The number of drug addicts being treated has dropped
by half in Portugal, they cut the rate by 50%.
What happened?
I thought it was supposed to go up.
No, there's far less drug addicts.
And if you think that's an impressive number, drug related diseases,
including STDs and overdoses, have been reduced by an even greater number.
>> Look, he wasn't lying at that moment in time, August of 2012.
Data indicated that HIV transmission rates through shared syringes had plummeted.
And other metrics illustrated the success of the decriminalization policy as well.
From 2000 to 2008, prison populations fell by 16.5%.
Overdose rates dropped as public funds flowed from jails to rehabilitation.
There was no evidence of a feared surge in drug use.
The decriminalization policy in Portugal was so
successful that in 2009, while writing for the Cato Institute.
Glenn Greenwald reported that, quote, none of the parade of horrors that
decriminalization opponents in Portugal predicted.
And that decriminalization opponents around the world typically invoke,
has come to pass.
And he was right about that.
But things have unfortunately begun to shift in a scary direction.
Officials in Portugal,
including the very architect of decriminalization in the country,
say they're noticing a steep spike in the number of people suffering from addiction.
A newly released national survey suggests the percent of
adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8%
in 2022, and that's up from 7.8% in 2001.
In other words, there are now more adults reporting illicit drug use today
compared to the year the decriminalization policy was implemented.
With the very intention of lowering the prevalence of drug abuse.
Portugal is still doing better than some European countries, and
drug use there is still below European averages.
So you've gotta look at it all in context, okay?
Analysis by the Washington Post found that Portugal's prevalence of high risk
opioid use is higher than Germany's, but lower than that of France and Italy.
But what about overdoses?
Unfortunately, that's where things start to look pretty bleak.
Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and
almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023.
Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and
ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe,
with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage.
Yeah, I think that suggestion is correct.
Now in Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from
city streets surged 24% between 2021 and 2022,
with this year on track to far outpace the last.
Crime, including robbery in public spaces, spiked 14% from
2021 to 2022, arise police blame on increased drug use.
And look, let's just pause for a second.
That doesn't surprise me either.
People who are addicted, especially if they're addicted to certain drugs
like heroin, fentanyl, if they don't get their next fix,
they become dope sick, and they could even die in some cases.
And so they'll do anything to get the resources in order to get their hands on
their next fix.
So that's why you'll notice instances of burglaries and
stuff like that, kind of spike in relation to
simultaneously with a spike in drug overdoses and drug use.
Anyway, not only does the Washington Post provide broad statistics on how
the liberal drug policy has fared in recent years.
They also detail tragic stories of individuals struggling with addiction,
leading any non sociopathic person to feel quite a bit of despair.
So take the story of one of the state funded so
called squat houses on the south side of Porto as an example.
The objective is to provide addicts a private place to use outside of
public view.
But there are unintended consequences, as it enables some to hide their
drug addiction from family members who might be able to stage an intervention and
help their loved ones get clean.
Inside, a 47-year-old man struggled to mix ashy heroin with fragments of
crystal crack, crushing both into a souped-up speedball.
Observed by a nurse, he took the needle and jabbed it into a vein in his neck.
The veins on his hands have dried up, the nurse said matter-of-factly.
I can't use at home, said another person at the center.
It causes too much trouble.
So I make the drive an hour and a half here.
And look, I also don't begrudge some who feel these policies do little to
compel people who are addicted to drugs to get clean.
Because, fact of the matter is, that's really not what these government funded
organizations are interested in doing.
And they're clear about that.
In the tourist quarter, in the shadow of Porto's fortresslike cathedral,
a social worker with a government funded nonprofit handed out
clean syringe packages to people who use heroin.
When crack pipes are available, the social workers give them out.
There's no judgment, few questions, and no pressure to embrace change.
Now, summing up that philosophy, a woman named Luisa Neves,
who's the president of one of these nonprofits, said, quote,
you have to respect the user if they want to use it is their right.
Now, I think safe injection sites are incredibly important
in preventing the spread of deadly diseases.
But, how these sites are operated matters a lot.
And we'll get to what I mean by that in just a moment.
And while I want to reiterate that these policies were passed with the absolute
best intentions, the unintended consequences are hard to ignore in
recent years, but they can be fixed.
Now, over the last 18 months,
a drug encampment in Porto sprung up below a school.
More homes have been burgled.
One neighbor said she found a person naked from the waist down,
shooting up outside her house gate.
Residents have launched US-style neighborhood watches and
hired private security guards, something exceedingly rare in Europe.
Police deployed in force to the area three months ago to crack
down on dealers who can be and are being arrested.
Patrol cars are now stationed in the neighborhood 24 hours a day,
scattering people using drugs.
And the mayor of Porto recounts a contradiction spurred by the policy that
sounds honestly,
all too familiar to those living in coastal cities in Western United States.
These days in Portugal, it is forbidden to smoke tobacco outside of school or
a hospital.
It is forbidden to advertise ice cream and sugar candies, and yet
it is allowed for people to be there injecting drugs.
We've normalized it.
By the way, the mayor of Porto does not want to
reverse the decriminalization law in Portugal, but
he is calling for some tweaks, and we'll get to that in just a moment.
Now, even the head of Portugal's National Institute on drug use and
the very architect of the decriminalization policy in the country.
Admitted to local press in December that, quote,
what we have today no longer serves as an example to anyone.
His words, not mine.
But he's not ready to fully reverse the policy, and I'd agree with him.
Instead, he wants to make improvements.
And there are two things that stand out to me while looking at this story closely.
For one, the program started with the government carrying out services
following decriminalization, but later outsourced the work to nonprofits.
So, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012.
A funding drop from 82.7 million to 17.4 million forced Portugal's main institution
to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups.
Including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs.
The cut in funding quite clearly had a terrible impact and
weakened Portugal's successful program.
Also, speaking from personal experience here in Los Angeles,
leaning on publicly funded nonprofits to carry out the job is a terrible idea.
For one, there tends to be a lot of waste.
Just look at the insane six figure salaries of the executives for
these nonprofits and how much money they take home every year.
Paid for by the taxpayer, of course.
Also, these nonprofits would no longer serve a purpose and
would no longer receive government grants if drug abuse issues were solved.
We certainly wouldn't need as many of them if these issues were mitigated through
other means.
There is an inevitable conflict of interest, and
I'd rather have a centralized government program.
Luckily, Portugal is headed in the right direction and is now moving to create
a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
As with many liberal US cities, Portugal's lack of emphasis on rehabilitation while
pursuing harm reduction strategies is also proving to be a problem.
The number of users being funneled into drug treatment in Portugal has
sharply fallen, going from a peak of 1150 in 2015 to 352 in 2021,
the most recent year available.
And what about so called dissuasion commissions,
the commissions I mentioned earlier that are supposed to talk to people and
try to encourage them to get clean?
Well, of two dozen street people who by the way,
that's The Washington Post's wording, not mine.
But, of the two dozen people who use drugs and were asked by The Post,
not one said they'd ever appeared before one of Portugal's dissuasion commissions.
Envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab.
Now, look, identifying the current flaws in Portugal's decriminalization model
is critical if we want to avoid circling back to destructive war on drug policies.
Some of the earliest adopters of liberal drug policies, unfortunately,
have now begun reversing course.
Consider lawmakers in Amsterdam and
how they decided to institute a ban on smoking pot in public places.
Honestly, that reversal seems a bit overboard.
But, it's also worth noting Norway's decision to implement a Portugal
like plan to decriminalize drugs, well, that fell apart in 2021.
And cities across the US have implemented, in their minds,
Portugal's model because of how successful it was in the beginning.
And to be fair, I'd be shocked if municipal lawmakers were aware of
the latest data and how it demonstrates otherwise.
In fact, numbers coming out of states like Oregon
make it pretty clear that they are unaware of some of these issues and flaws.
In Oregon, where the policy took effect in early 2021,
openly citing Portugal as a model, attempts to funnel people with addiction
from jail to rehabilitation have had a rough start.
Police have shown little interest in handing out toothless citations for drug
use, grants for treatment have lagged, I would really emphasize that part.
And extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation.
Meanwhile, overdoses this year in Portland, the state's largest city,
have surged 46%.
And if you zoom out and look at the United States overall,
the numbers are stunning and incredibly tragic.
So, in the United States alone, overdose deaths fueled by opioids and
deadly synthetic fentanyl topped 100,000 people in both 2021 and 2022.
And that's double what it was in 2015.
Look, people are dying, and we need to find a way to reverse this trend.
We desperately need to find a way to save lives without going back
to overly punitive policies.
Let's just pause for a second, I wanna reiterate that,
I do not want to go back to war on drugs like overly punitive policies.
They did not work, they were not good.
I do think that we can save this model, but we need to make some tweaks.
The problem is, people are unwilling to ever admit that something isn't
really going as well as we thought it was going or
that there might be some flaws that we might wanna work on.
Because if we don't learn from Portugal's mistakes or our own,
we definitely will go to war on drug policies and mass incarceration.
That, again, does nothing to actually deal with why these individuals have drug
addiction issues in the first place, right?
It's not gonna do anything to actually help them get rehabilitated.
Now, Portugal also commits far more of its resources to social spending programs.
So, for anyone who might think that, well,
maybe the problem in Portugal is the same problem we have here in the United States.
Root causes everyone.
Root causes it's because of poverty.
Not quite, the OECD defines this as expenditures targeted at low income
households, the elderly, disabled, sick, unemployed, or young persons.
Now, Portugal not only dedicates a higher percentage of its GDP to social welfare
spending compared to the United States, and that's, again, according to OECD data.
It also has a much better health care system.
While it definitely isn't perfect,
all residents in Portugal have access to health care.
So they have universal health care provided by the National Health Service,
which is funded mainly through taxes.
They still have copayments, and healthcare delivery is based on both public and
private providers.
So while it's not a single payer model,
they do have universal health care in Portugal, yet they're still having
the same problems we're experiencing with drug addiction here in the United States.
So, sometimes the issues that we're seeing need more than more social programs.
I think Portugal's model is promising.
It shows that it worked.
They made some changes beginning in 2012, and those changes were not positive ones.
They did not have a positive impact.
But that's okay.
Clearly, they're reversing course, and I'm excited to see how the numbers
change now that they're going back to a centralized government model.
That takes care of the services associated with their drug policies instead of kind
of outsourcing them to these nonprofits.
But, the point that I'm trying to make here is, sometimes you have to adapt to
the situation changing, and clearly the situation changed in Portugal.
And if we're going to point to Portugal as a success story, if we're going to
implement Portugal's policies in US cities and use Portugal as an inspiration.
We just gotta make sure that we implement it correctly.
Because my fear is, if we don't, if the policies fail, the pendulum will
swing in the opposite direction, and we need to prevent that from happening.