Europe | Drugs in Europe

Not mind-stretching enough

Liberal drug policies have spread across Europe. But some early adopters are slipping behind

|AMSTERDAM, LISBON AND PRAGUE

ON A cobbled street lined with tourist shops in central Prague, a darkened storefront advertises cannabis-flavoured beer and absinthe ice cream. Inside, chocolate bars featuring Bob Marley’s face are for sale alongside “mushroom cookies” and glass bongs. Nothing stronger is on offer. But in a country where the possession of drugs is mostly tolerated, it is not hard to find the real stuff elsewhere: dealers loiter in the city’s main square, and barmen sell cannabis under the counter.

On paper, most European countries still have strict laws on drug-taking (see map). But over the past few decades most have relaxed their enforcement of those laws, fining or warning recreational drug users rather than sending them to jail. Three countries have led the way. In the Netherlands, although possession of drugs is technically illegal, cannabis has been officially tolerated since the 1970s, and is sold in around 600 “coffee shops” across the country. In the Czech Republic possession of small amounts of any illicit drug (one gram of cocaine, around ten grams of cannabis) was decriminalised in the 1990s. Portugal decriminalised the possession of all drugs for personal use in 2001.

Yet over the past few years these countries’ reforms have lost momentum, or even slipped backwards. Most drug-policy experts consider this a shame. The reformist countries’ experiences not only show how well liberal drug policies work; they suggest they need to go further.

Countries adopt liberal drug policies for different reasons. In the Netherlands policymakers responded to a sharp increase in heroin consumption in the 1970s by drawing a line between hard and soft drugs. A similar heroin epidemic in Portugal in the 1980s and 1990s caused a steep rise in HIV/AIDs rates, so the government decided to treat drug-taking as a public-health problem. By contrast, the shift in the Czech Republic was made quietly by reformers after the Velvet revolution of 1989. Drugs such as heroin and cocaine were always rare there; the chief hard drug remains homemade speed known locally as “pervitin”, after the brand name of the methamphetamines distributed to Nazi soldiers in the second world war.

Those opposed to decriminalising drug-taking have always argued that it will lead to more consumption, or that soft drugs such as cannabis are gateways to harder drugs. Evidence for both is shaky. Lifetime cannabis use—a measure of whether adults have ever tried it—is high in the Czech Republic, but in the Netherlands it is around the European Union average; in Portugal it is far lower. The French, who have some of the toughest cannabis laws (users can get up to a year in jail or a hefty fine), are the biggest tokers in the EU. The lifetime prevalence of illicit drug-taking among adults has been falling in Portugal, from 12% in 2007 to 9.5% in 2012. Among those between the ages of 15 and 34, the year-on-year evidence is also mixed. After Portugal introduced lighter controls, cannabis use among youngsters dropped slightly; in some other places that introduced lighter punishments it fell steeply (see chart).

Even more cheering data come from the public-health side. In 2014 there were just 40 new HIV cases associated with injecting drugs in Portugal, compared with 1,482 in 2000. In the Czech Republic a mere 0.3% of HIV infections are related to drug-taking, compared with 30% in Italy and 6% in France. Figures on drug-related deaths can be under-reported, but in the Netherlands, Portugal and the Czech Republic, rates of drug-induced fatality are far lower than in countries such as Britain and Sweden that have harsher drug laws.

This has helped encourage others to go further. A handful of American states and Uruguay have legalised cannabis production and consumption; from next year Canada will follow suit.

But Europe’s trailblazers are falling back. One reason is the squeeze on public finances. In Portugal in 2012, in the throes of an EU and IMF bail-out, the government closed the autonomous drug agency and merged its staff of 1,700 with the national health service—a move which was criticised by specialists as potentially weakening harm-reduction services. In the Czech Republic cash for prevention services, such as school programmes, fell from €2.5m in 2010 to €1.5m in 2014, and funds for harm reduction, such as needle exchanges, fell in 2011. Money for treatment facilities and sobering-up stations was also trimmed.

Those funds are sorely needed. In a suburb of Prague, the city’s largest drug contact centre offers a needle-exchange system, mostly for methamphetamine addicts. With pictures of Gandhi and Sid Vicious on the walls, the place looks a little like a youth hostel. Each day around 100 people visit and around 3,500 needles are exchanged, says David Pesek, who runs the centre; every week, a few users move into abstinence programmes. But there are an estimated 10,000 hard-core injecting drug addicts in Prague, and the existing centres cannot keep up.

The second problem is complacency—meaning that politicians in countries with harm-reduction policies often think the drug problem has been solved—or even a backlash against liberal reforms. In the Netherlands cultivation of cannabis remains illegal and much of the country’s production is done by organised criminals. In recent years some municipalities have tried to force coffee shops to serve only residents with Dutch ID cards to prevent the influx of foreign drug-takers, but the policy has largely failed. In Portugal and the Czech Republic many who work with drug-takers worry that, now that most of them are off the streets, non-users will resent public funds being spent on them.

This is a bad time to be turning back the clock. In America and elsewhere, opioid consumption has reached epidemic levels, largely because of overprescription of painkillers. Europe has not seen such a resurgence yet, though there are some worrying signs. European countries remain strangely divided over drug policy, ignoring the continent’s successes. Few countries are pushing for new reforms, says Tom Blickman, a drug-policy expert in Amsterdam. In Europe, where thanks to open borders each country’s policies affect its neighbours, “everyone is keeping each other in check,” he says. This results in harsh (but spottily implemented) penalties in some places, looser laws elsewhere and a sense that Europe is no longer a place where policymakers can take risks.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "Not mind-stretching enough"

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