Portugal's plan to decriminalize all drugs is often cited by American proponents as a blueprint to handle addiction, but drug use and overdoses have only spiked in recent years.
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, preferring a "dissuasion commission" over jail time for drug users.
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The European country has inspired many decriminalization efforts in the United States, including so-called "harm reduction" initiatives such as "safe consumption sites," "safe smoking kits," and the distribution of overdose reversal drugs such as naloxone, or Narcan.
Oregon's Measure 110, which similarly decriminalized all hard drugs in the state, falls short in key areas to address the more fundamental problem of drug addiction, Manhattan Institute fellow Charles Fain Lehman told the Washington Examiner.
While Oregon is facing major blight as a result of Measure 110, even Portugal's model — which Lehman argues is, at a baseline, better equipped than Oregon's to handle addiction — has been falling far short of the promised outcome.
Up from its 2001 number of 7.8%, adults who use illicit drugs in Portugal jumped to 12.8% in 2022, while overdose rates are at their highest point in 12 years. Overdoses in Lisbon, the Iberian country's capital and largest city, nearly doubled from 2019 to 2023, while in Porto, the second-largest city, drug paraphernalia strewn about the streets rose 24% from 2021 to 2022, and crime increased 14% — something police said is related to drug use.
“These days in Portugal, it is forbidden to smoke tobacco outside a 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,” Porto Mayor Rui Moreira told the Washington Post. “We’ve normalized it.”
Antonio Leitao da Silva, Porto chief of municipal police, added that the situation is similar to pre-decriminalization.
However, Portuguese illicit drug use and overdose death rates are still below the European average, and Lehman said, "It is hard, at this point, to argue that Portugal’s decriminalization approach is a disaster."
"While we can’t say what they would be absent decriminalization, they are clearly not as bad as critics expected," he added.
Portugal's model has become a primary example for American blue city leadership to justify decriminalization efforts, but Lehman said it is a model "U.S. liberals often don't understand."
"In Portugal, you can still be arrested for public drug possession. You’re just referred to a 'dissuasion commission,' which asks about your drug use and refers you to treatment if you agree that your use has become disruptive or problematic," he explained.
One primary difference between Portugal and Oregon is deterrence and treatment.
Dr. Joao Goulao, the architect of Portugal's model and current director-general of the Service for Intervention on Addictive Behaviors and Dependencies, spoke at Georgetown University's law school last month, saying the system has the capacity to work, but the "difficulties" it faces are rooted in a lack of public funding and increased demand from the coronavirus.
"Tightened fiscal capacity means less money to spend for treatment on-demand, which is critical to making decriminalization work," Lehman said, adding, "If you aren’t actively shunting users into treatment — arresting and referring them to the dissuasion commissions — then you can’t control drug use as a public health problem."
Oregon, however, decided not to include a similar deterrence mechanism.
"Compare this to the Oregon approach, where they have no dissuasion commission — they decided it wouldn’t work in Oregon, for some reason — and no enforcement even minorly deterring public drug use," Lehman explained, saying formal and informal pressure to discourage drug use, through institutions and funding drug treatment, is required. "You can’t just give up on deterring drug use altogether and expect anything but the outcomes Oregon is now experiencing."
As the Washington Examiner reported, Oregon's overdose deaths skyrocketed over 13 times the national average since implementing Measure 110, and homelessness spiked to 23 times the national average. Meanwhile, Portland, where the blight has been felt most acutely, has been hemorrhaging residents and, with them, tax dollars.
When asked why Oregon decided to brush aside enforcement or treatment, Lehman said, "The community harms of drug use, particularly public drug use, are reliably dismissed by proponents of decriminalization, so they don’t really see a reason for enforcement."
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That is similar to what has happened to Portugal's model, according to the Washington Post, which reported that publicly funded nongovernmental organizations are the primary response to addiction but "seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right."
While Oregon's plan was to funnel tax revenue from marijuana sales into treatment facilities, less than 1% went to new treatment facilities in the first year, while much of the funding went to "harm reduction."