Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (51 page)

I felt a sense of physical relief as he spoke, and as I reviewed these figures. It has turned out, it seems, that strengthening people’s internal resistance to drugs works a lot better than trying to terrorize them away from drugs with force. The alternative works. And the best proof is that virtually nobody in Portugal is arguing for a return to the old ways.

“All the Portuguese society accepts it completely. It is a system that is settled,” Figueira says. As I traveled around Portugal, I struck up conversations with people on trains and in cafés and on the streets, and it was startling to me to see how quickly decriminalization had become the common sense of the country. People described the idea of busting users and addicts with puzzlement, as if it were a strange medieval practice from the distant past. A few people argued that the benefits for addicts are too generous, but that is the only criticism I heard. Nobody sees this as a Hollywood ending. Everybody knows addiction continues, and it remains a tragedy. But there is a lot less of it.

João Figueira looks at me and, from behind his bushy mustache, he smiles. “I was not expecting,” he says, “that this would work so well.”

After I left my meeting with him, I walked the streets of Lisbon for hours lost in a head-rush of optimism, because I saw now, for the first time, how narrow the gap is between even the most passionate prohibitionists and people who want to radically change the laws.

Most of the people I have met on this journey who support the drug war are not like Harry Anslinger, driven by racism and hatred and personal inadequacy. They are like João Figueira: admirable people who have a series of understandable worries about the alternative. They support the drug war out of compassion for all the people they fear might become victims if we relaxed the laws. They are good people. They are acting out of decency.

It occurred to me as I walked up and down those Lisbon streets that we all—the vast majority of drug warriors, and the vast majority of legalizers—have a set of shared values. We all want to protect children from drugs. We all want to keep people from dying as a result of drug use. We all want to reduce addiction. And now the evidence strongly suggests that when we move beyond the drug war, we will be able to achieve those shared goals with much greater success.

At the start of my journey, I set out to find an answer to a contradiction within myself, and within our culture—between the impulse to be compassionate to addicts, and the impulse to crush and destroy our addictive impulses. Now, at last, I see—and really feel—that it is not a contradiction at all. A compassionate approach
leads
to less addiction. The conflict within me—the one I found so disturbing—is not a conflict at all. It’s not a question of one impulse winning over the other. They can both win—if we just do it right.

If this insight were more widely understood, I asked myself, how would it change our debate? I think we’d start to see this isn’t a debate about values. It’s a debate about how to achieve those values. In the United States alone, legalizing drugs would save $41 billion a year currently spent on arresting, trying, and jailing users and sellers, according to a detailed study by the Cato Institute.
³¹
If the drugs were then taxed at a similar rate to alcohol and tobacco, they would raise an additional $46.7 billion
³²
a year, according to calculations by Professor Jeffrey Miron of the Department of Economics at Harvard University. That’s $87.8 billion next year, and every year. For that money, you could provide the Portuguese style of treatment and social reconnection for every drug addict in America.

I know there are people who say that the United States, or Britain, or other large countries can’t learn from other countries—that Portugal is so small and so different it has nothing to teach a superpower. As João Figueira waved good-bye to me from his police station where no drug user will ever be busted again, I pictured Leigh Maddox, who told me back in Baltimore that this model could save her city too. I kept walking.

That afternoon, as I strolled through the squares of Lisbon, middle-aged men skulked up to me and flashed packets of drugs. “You want? You want?” they asked insistently.

It’s important to understand the limits of the Portuguese experiment. They have decriminalized the personal possession but not the sale of drugs. This is a strange hybrid: everyone knows that to possess drugs, you have to buy them—so under this system, you mostly still have to go to these criminals and their gangs. This means the new Portuguese laws save Marcia Powell and the women in Tent City, but they do not stop Arnold Rothstein or Rosalio Reta or their local affiliates.

True, it has dented their business a little in some ways. When the methadone vans started going out across the country’s streets, the drug dealers stoned the vans and smashed up the offices of the health workers, because—as João Goulão says—“it was the first time there was a decrease in the[ir] earnings” in their memories. But they still control the bulk of the trade. Decriminalization can’t take it away from them; only legalization can.

The architects of the Portuguese drug revolution believe this will come, in time. I asked João Goulão if he was sympathetic to this argument. “Yes,” he said, “and I believe this is the trend. But I also believe that this trend needs a vast consensus among nations, and I don’t believe that the political environment even here in Europe is very in favor of such a movement. But it will happen—in the future.”

Back in the yellow sands of the Algarve in 1996, before the laws were changed, before the treatment was expanded, before the drug war ended, another young addict—the last in this book—was staggering in to see a doctor.

Antonio Gago was a stringy and strung-out boy who, at the age of fourteen, had started coping with the fact he was being abused by his dad by smoking heroin. He was twenty-one, and he knew only that all the local addicts had Dr. João Goulão’s personal phone number: he handed it out to anybody he thought might need it. At first, João got Antonio a daily supply of methadone—but, perhaps more important, he listened. He seemed to think Antonio’s feelings and thoughts mattered. Even on his days off, he would sometimes meet Antonio, and sit with him. One Christmas Day, Antonio received a call from João, who was contacting all his addicted patients one by one. “You’re going to get what you want—a new life,” he said.

“You can have more honesty with a doctor like this,” Antonio told me, years later. “I never felt any kind of condemnation, and that helped me to open up my life and my heart a little bit more.” He started to talk about the real reasons why he used drugs: the things his father did. “I had to cover that up with the drugs,” he says.

João helped him to get into rehab, and when Antonio came out and sank back into heroin, he wasn’t judgmental. He was just there.

When João was put in charge of the country’s drug policy, he started to fund long-term therapeutic communities where addicts can live and be helped to rebuild their lives over a period of years. This, at last, was the shoe that fit Antonio. Living at a center called Team Challenge in idyllic green fields on the outskirts of Lisbon, surrounded by the quiet whir of wind farms, he learned for the first time how to trust. He was amazed that the people he meets leave him alone with their wallets or their children. He never thought that would happen to him again. Step by step, he was gaining the confidence to leave his drug use behind. When I met him, he had been abstinent for years.

Now, every morning, Antonio goes out in a van to find the addicts on the streets who are still lost in their pain, to give them whatever they need—whether it’s food, or clean needles, or the knowledge that there is a safe place they can come to, for free, for love, when they are ready. He believes in giving out lots of hugs. All across the country, there are armies of former addicts employed like this, to rescue the people they left behind on the streets.

And it was only when I met Antonio and saw his little white van that I thought I really began to understand what had happened in Portugal in the decade since the death of the drug war. Prohibition—this policy I have traced across continents and across a century—consists of endlessly spreading downward spirals. People get addicted so we humiliate and shame them until they become more addicted. They then have to feed their habit by persuading more people to buy the drugs from them and become addicted in turn. Then those people need to be humiliated and shamed. And so it goes, on and on.

But in Portugal after the drug war, the state helped people to get better, and then those people helped more people to get better, and then they helped still more people to get better—and so the downward spiral of the drug war has been replaced by a healing ripple that spreads slowly out across the society.

On my last day in Lisbon, I thought of João as a young man on the streets of Lisbon, watching the tyranny fall—and I thought I could now see why he believes this is the continuation of the spirit of 1974. The Portuguese people rose up then to say that every single one of them deserved a life and a voice, and that they would not be beaten down or shut up ever again. And now their drug policy says that every one of them—even the weakest and sickest of their siblings—deserves not to be beaten down or shut up but to be embraced, and offered hope, and love.

In a true democracy, nobody gets written off. Nobody gets abandoned. Nobody’s life is declared to be not worth living. That was the spirit of the revolution. The revolution lives.

Chapter 17

The Man in the Well

When I started this book, no country had ever gone further than decriminalization: Portugal was the end of the line. But then, as I was writing, history began to shift beneath my feet.

One country—a tiny nation sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil—took a step nobody had taken since Harry Anslinger’s war began in the 1930s. They fully legalized a drug. And, at the same time, a rebellion began at the very heart of the drug war, when two American states, in ballot initiatives, voted to do the same.