portugal

Brian Mann covers the U-S opioid and fentanyl crisis for NPR. That means he talks to a lot of people struggling with addiction. Again and again, he's heard stories of people who have succumbed to their addiction — last year 112, 000 — more than ever in history.

But when Mann traveled to Portugal to report on that country's model for dealing with the opioid crisis, he heard a very different story. Overdose deaths in Portugal are extremely rare.

The country has taken a radically different approach to drugs – decriminalizing small amounts and publicly funding addiction services – including sites where people can use drugs like crack and heroin.

Portugal treats addiction as an illness rather than a crime. No one has to pay for addiction care, and no one scrambles to navigate a poorly regulated recovery system. Could Portugal's approach help the U-S fight its opioid epidemic?

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The war on drugs was declared in 1971 by president Richard Nixon in a press conference that went on to outline a plan to fight the trade of controlled substances across the world. Drugs were declared national enemy number 1.  Since then over 1 trillion dollars have been spent on fighting this battle and by all metrics, it has been money poorly spent.  It’s probably no surprise to anybody that drug-related deaths and crimes have done nothing but rise over the 50 years since Nixon made this declaration.  With the benefit of hindsight, it was pretty easy to see why... you can’t fight the forces of supply and demand in unregulated markets with m16’s and government agents.  Trying to do so would be like trying to fight a hurricane by dropping bombs on it. Not particularly effective and if anything it’s just going to cause even more collateral damage.  But perhaps this is all starting to change, just last week during the election, the people of Oregon also voted on something else that will potentially have even more influence than who the next president is.  The people of the state voted to decriminalize drugs, all drugs, even the hard stuff. This might look like waving the white flag in defeat and finally admitting that drugs have won the war on drugs. But it might also be what we should have been doing all along, fighting the war on drugs with economics.  To understand what economists mean by this we will need to look at a few key areas. Why couldn’t the war on drugs disrupt this market? What is driving the growth in this market? And could legalization provide a better solution to dealing with this issue?

Much of what will happen after Brexit remains obscure, but in this special post-referendum podcast, FT Money deputy editor James Pickford and guests discuss the ramifications for the future of British investments, property and pensions.

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