Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (49 page)

But this is—I was going to discover—only the first layer of support for addicts in Portugal, and not the most important.

João believes that addiction is an expression of despair, and the best way to deal with despair is to offer a better life, where the addict doesn’t feel the need to anesthetize herself anymore. Giving rewards, rather than making threats, is the path out. Congratulate them. Give them options. Help them build a life.

That was his reasoning behind the second and most important phase of treatment for addicts in Portugal. Once you take those first courageous steps to Taipas or a center like it, the government will prioritize getting you a job with a decent wage, away from the world where you used drugs. “They want to be a part of the society,” he tells me. “We can’t [tell] them to behave as a normal citizen and deprive them . . . of a role in society: having a job, having work, having a salary.” His aim is to give them something to lose.

So the government gives a hefty yearlong tax break to anybody who employs a recovering addict. Almost always, when the year is up, the employer keeps the former addict on in his garage or bakery or shop, because she has turned out to be a good worker.

The last time João moved with his family, he hired a moving company that was established with the help of his department. Ten recovering addicts came together to form a cooperative, and the state lent them the money to buy a truck at a very low interest rate. His wife had been nervous, but the guys did a perfect job, João says with pride. Of course, he adds, in that cooperative of ten, “some of them will relapse,” but now “the others are protectors. They will help to deal with that problem. They will insist: go to your doctor, go now, as soon as possible, try to stop again, then you can work with us again. They as a group protect themselves.”

This, it occurs to me after we speak, is the precise opposite of the prohibitionist approach. In the drug war, we guarantee addicts will find it almost impossible to work again, by marking them with the scarlet letter of a criminal record. After the drug war, we will make it easier to employ recovering addicts, with subsidies—because we understand this will keep them from relapsing more effectively than the threat of being caged.

If, however, you are not ready to move away from using drugs, you will be given a different kind of support.

On a misty Friday morning, I took the subway to a housing project on the edge of Lisbon. The apartments were even more cramped than in the rest of the city, piled on top of each other with brightly colored bricks, like some dystopian Lego model. A large graffitied mural of a rapper I didn’t recognize stared at me, as did several women who were hanging out their underwear from their tenth-floor windows. A wispy fog was hanging over the place, so I had to focus hard to see the street names. They were stern: I realized I was wandering along the Avenida Cidade de Bratislava.

At the bottom of the housing project, by a busy road, the mist was clearing, and I could see a plain white van with an open window and a short line of men and women standing in a line, chatting, beside it.

The small white cups they were handed contained methadone. They swallowed it, and then talked to the psychologists and doctors standing there, listening sympathetically. Then they left and got on with their day. João had told me back in his office that with this drug, “you don’t feel high but you remain with no suffering for the lack of heroin . . . So you are completely available to work, to study, or whatever. Even to drive a truck—we have several truck drivers on methadone.”

I stood with the social workers and listened to their conversations. Their goals were, it quickly became clear, more modest than those of the Taipas Treatment Center. These were the addicts who believed they were not ready to stop, and who were at serious risk of dying of an overdose or of a disease transmitted by dirty needles.

Nuno Biscaia, a psychologist in his midthirties, clearly knew everybody who came here by name, after years of befriending them. I talked to him for hours as the sun came out. A good day at work for him, he said, was when he could persuade one of the addicts he worked with to move from injecting heroin to smoking heroin. I looked at the line of addicts—a tall young man who speaks three languages, a defeated-looking woman in her forties, an angry guy who pulls up on a motorcycle and doesn’t want to talk—and wondered how many of them would stay alive if this service was shut down.

Some people argue that you didn’t have to decriminalize drugs in Portugal to expand treatment in this way. You could have more treatment,
and
criminalization. It was only standing here, in this line of addicts, that the flaw in this argument became clear to me. These Portuguese addicts were standing in a long line in public, in front of their friends and neighbors and employers. A police car drove past as they were being served; nobody tensed, or even seemed to notice, except me. Would they come forward
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every morning before everyone to declare themselves criminals?

A few days later, I went out with another team, whose job was to get help to the hardest-to-reach addicts—the people who live on the streets, or in abandoned housing. As we walked through ragged half-houses made of rubble and the battered housing projects, these social workers told me that before João’s drug revolution, people ran from them. Now, they run toward them. Addicts come forward, to replace their needles, to chat, to say they are thinking about asking for help. Their reactions were so different from those I had learned under prohibition, I kept being thrown off by them. Can’t you see these are the authorities? Run!

I wanted to understand the long-term effects of this approach on individuals—and in Portugal’s second-largest city, Oporto, I met a man who seemed to epitomize them.

Sergio Rodrigues was sleeping in an abandoned roofless house with only the sky above him in the last days of Portugal’s drug war, when he was suddenly woken up.

He was being kicked, hard, again and again, all over his body.

He knew what was happening. All the street addicts in Portugal knew what this was.

It’s the police, and they were beating him up, for sport, for fun, because this is a war, and addicts are the enemy. “Get out of here!” they snarled.

Sergio had been an addict for eleven years. He shot up heroin and cocaine five, ten, twenty times a day, however much he could afford, to nuke as much of his consciousness as he could. He had grown up in one of the poorest parts of the city of Oporto, in claustrophobic concrete streets that are a strange mash-up of sixteenth-century buildings and twenty-first-century criminality. In his neighborhood, everybody his age that he knew stood on ancient European cobbles to sell or snort cut Colombian cocaine. All his brothers were street addicts.

He was sixteen when he started, and he didn’t see when it would end, but he suspected it would be soon. His friends on the street were dying all around him. Some days he would ask where a friend was, because he hadn’t seen him in a while. But in his heart, he would know.

Except, because João had changed the law, a very different group of people was about to come looking for Sergio. João and his panel knew that somebody like Sergio—cut off from society, and terrified of the authorities, after a generation of the drug war—would be hard to reach, so, as part of their policy revolution, they put in place another way to help him. They employed street teams of psychologists to fan out across the country to look in all the old ruined houses and broken crannies where the most hard-core addicts live, and to offer them help. At first, these teams
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approached modestly, offering clean needles, and collecting the dirty old ones.

Over time, in these exchanges, as they struck up conversations, they formed relationships. They gave advice on where you should inject yourself to stay as safe as possible, and on how to avoid disease. Then, discreetly, they started to explain that there was a way out, if you wanted it.

Sometimes they were only planting a seed that would take years to grow; sometimes people wanted help fast. Now that the punishments were gone, people like Sergio were—tentatively—starting to listen. The face of authority was changing. Where once there were police
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with batons to beat you, there are now psychologists offering help.

It was a street team that persuaded Sergio to try a treatment center for rehab, so he could become abstinent. He went. He tried. But it didn’t work: he couldn’t stay off heroin.

When that shoe didn’t fit, the street team didn’t write him off as a failure. They tried another shoe to see if it fit better. They got him into a longer-term program, called a therapeutic community, where he lived for one and a half years, regularly saw a psychologist, and was given the substitute drug methadone every day.

Sergio got a job. He got into a relationship. His girlfriend got pregnant. And as his bonds with the world around him grew stronger, his bonds with his drug began to weaken and wither. So he decided to stop the methadone. Now he uses only cannabis or cocaine very occasionally, at parties.

“My life has changed completely,” he said when I met him in a chichi café in Oporto with a piano player tinkling in the corner and a sycophantic waiter bowing at our every request. He looked no different from the other customers. He paid taxes, and he beamed when he talked about his excitement at how he was about to become a dad. As we sat together, I couldn’t help thinking that in the countries where the drug war was still being waged, he would be regarded even now as a criminal, and a failure.

We walked out onto the cobbled streets where once he had slept, broken and filthy, and Sergio waved good-bye as he walked back to a life made possible by the end of the drug war.

Yes, I kept thinking—things are better for addicts. I expected that. But what about for kids? I am very close to my nephews and my niece—this book is dedicated to them—and for all the horrors of the drug war, my biggest worry about ending it has always been that more kids might end up using drugs. This would damage them in all sorts of ways, but here’s just one: there is strong scientific evidence that persistent cannabis use affects how adolescent and teenage brains develop, and can permanently lower their IQ.
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One of my best friends when I was a kid smoked a lot of weed, and he feels it harmed him for life. He may be right. Developing brains are more fragile than adult brains: they need to be protected.