This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 7, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Glenn Greenwald has written a new paper for the Cato Institute

Drug Decriminalization in Portugal.

Lessons for Creating fair and successful drug policies.

In it he chronicles decriminalization of drugs in that country since 2001 and provide some perspective

on how the experiment might be repeated.

We spoke before a Cato policy forum for the paper on Friday.

Portugal was not some idyllic upper-middle-class country that was free of drug problems.

I mean this isn't Luxembourg or Monaco where they could afford the luxury of some sort of

of a libertarian experiment.

And actually there was, it wasn't a libertarian ideological dream either based on the

premise that adults should have the right to ingest into their bodies whatever

substances they choose. Actually what was happening was very similar to what's happening

now in the United States which was there was a booming drug crisis in Portugal. Primarily

heroin, the cocaine as well addiction was out of control and drug related

pathologies were rapidly increasing and the more they

criminalized the worst the problem became. And so in 1997 the

Portuguese government convened a commission of experts, health and policymaking

experts, with only one mandate, and that was to study drug policy options to determine what the optimal approach would be to

getting these problems under control.

Legalization or decriminalization was not any part of the mandate.

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