The four stages a person goes through
1. unconscious incompetence—this is the stage where you don't know that you don't know;
2. conscious incompetence—this is the stage that you know you dont know;
3. conscious competence—this is when you know that you know, but you have to consciously think about it;
4. unconscious competence—this is when it is second nature; this is when the information is part of you; this is when you know it just as easily as you know your own name; this is when it is fully internalized and is just automatic.
Background.
All publicly traded corporations have a legal responsibility to increase profits, it's the law! Think about it: With rare exception, every single business has one objective—to make more profits. The only way companies make more profits is by producing their product at the lowest possible cost, selling it at the highest possible price, and selling as much as they can. Every decision a company makes is to increase profits.
Companies, however, are run by people. People have two motivations first, to make more money for themselves personally; and, second, to increase their power, prestige, or influence. Therefore, the individuals who run companies will always make decisions based on what can personally enrich themselves. Very few individuals are concerned about the good of mankind, the environment, or achieving some spiritual nirvana. To varying degrees, decisions are based on the answer to the question, "What's in it for me?"
In business, is everything always about the money? Yes. Throughout the history of big business, planned obsolescence has been standard operating procedure. This is when a product is manufactured in such a way so that it will wear out or need to be replaced. The product could have been made to last a very long time; but in order for the company to ensure future profits, it knowingly manufactured an item that was inherently flawed. Thus it planned for the product's obsolescence, all in the name of profit.
In today's business environment, companies only do things that either increase sales, decrease the cost of the product, or guarantee a higher price for the product. A simplified example of this can be seen with restaurants that are located in airports. The restaurant has a monopoly, there is no competition. Since the restaurant knows it is not relying on repeat business, it does not have to give good-quality food, good service, or a fair price. Have you ever gotten a great meal with great service at a great price at an airport restaurant? I sure haven't. Why? Because they don't have to. Giving good service and a good product at a fair price will not increase profit at an airport restaurant because they are not relying on repeat customers.
I happen to be a capitalist and an entrepreneur. Throughout my life I have been motivated to make money. Money itself is not bad. Making money and profits is not bad. It becomes bad when it becomes greed. Making money becomes very bad when you "love money." Making money and making profits is very bad when you hurt your employees, lie and deceive your customers, destroy the environment, exploit workers, illegally drive competitors out of business, and purposely sell inferior products and services. When you put money above everything else, that is when making money is a problem. Money should be used and people loved. The problem is that money is loved and people used!
Pharmaceutical Industry;
Most Pharmaceutical Drugs are derived from plant extracts removing the active ingredients then produce a synthetic patented prescription. Single-molecule compounds are the preferred domain of Big Pharma, which favour patent-able isolates over “crude” whole plant synergies.
Single-molecule medicine is the predominant corporate way, the Big Pharma way, but it’s not the only way, and there’s scant evidence that it’s the best way to benefit from plant therapeutics.
Limited by single-molecule dogma and allergic to plant compounds that can’t be patented, Big Pharma is way behind the curve with respect to plant therapeutics. For all its billions, Big Pharma hasn’t done much for the human race.
Here is an example; Graviola – More Effective than Chemo
If you suffer from cancer and feel you need to have a specific treatment that is natural and at least as effective as chemotherapy or radiation, you may wish to consider the use of the herbal remedy graviola. Graviola is a plant indigenous to most of the warmest tropical areas in South and North America, including the Amazon.
Many active compounds and chemicals have been found in graviola, as scientists have been studying graviola’s properties since the 1940s. It has shown a large variety of benefits for numerous ailments, once of which is cancer. Graviola produces a set of chemicals called Annonaceous acetogenins. Graviola makes these natural compounds in its leaf and stem, bark, and fruit seeds. In a total of eight clinical studies, several independent research groups have confirmed that these chemicals have significant antitumorous properties and selective toxicity against various types of cancer cells (without harming healthy cells). Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, has conducted a great deal of research on these chemicals (acetogenins), much of which has been funded by The National Cancer Institute and/or the National Institute of Health (NIH). Thus far, Purdue University and/or its staff have filed at least nine U.S. and/or international patents on their work around the antitumorous and insecticidal properties and uses of these acetogenins.
One of America's billion-dollar drug companies attempted to produce an anticancer drug from Graviola after it discovered that this compound was 10,000 times more toxic to colon cancer cells than a common chemo drug. It found Graviola to be lethal to 12 different kinds of malignant cells, especially those that cause lung, prostate, and breast cancers, and to be also safe enough to protect healthy cells instead of killing them. With Graviola, there is no nausea or hair loss, dropping of large amounts of weight, getting weak, or compromising the immune system. Graviola actually boosts the immune system.
For seven years, this drug company tried to develop a synthetic patented prescription version of Graviola’s anticancer chemicals (you can't patent natural compounds – it's against the law), but all attempts failed and the project was terminated. Instead of making their findings public, the researchers boxed up the research and put it away for good. Eventually, though, the story leaked out and Graviola is now increasingly receiving the recognition it deserves among health professionals and researchers alike.
Many terminal cases of cancer were reversed through use of Graviola, even in people 85 years or older. When cancerous tumors break up, the body may be flooded with lots of poisons. When this happens the patient may feel quite poorly. To minimize the intensity of the healing crisis, it is important to cleanse the colon every day, perhaps through enemas, colema, colosan, etc. The kidneys should be supported by drinking the kidney tea. If possible, the liver should be cleansed, too.
Note: Graviola has cardiodepressant, vasodilator, and hypotensive (lowers blood pressure) actions. The dosage should be increased gradually. Overly large dosages can cause nausea and vomiting. Use only when under the supervision of a health practitioner who understands its value, the above actions, and possible interaction with other medical drugs.
Brief History
The immense extent to which the oil industry has shaped and is ruling the world as we know it.
“From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not affected by the petrochemical industry.
The story of oil is the story of the modern world. And this is the story of those who helped shape that world, and how the oil-igarchy they created is on the verge of monopolizing life itself.”
While most people are well-acquainted with the Rockefeller name, few probably know the true history of the Rockefellers’ rise to power.
Big Oil — An Industry Founded on Treachery and Deceit
Certain details of the Big Oil story are well known. Others are more obscure. The story begins in rural New York state in the early 19th century, with William Avery Rockefeller, an authentic “snake oil salesman” going by the fictional name of “Dr. Bill Livingston.”
While neither a doctor nor a cancer specialist, Rockefeller, aka “Dr. Livingston,” aka “Devil Bill,” traveled the country’s back roads conning people into buying his “Rock Oil” tonic for cancer — “a useless mixture of laxative and petroleum that had no effect whatsoever.”
William Avery Rockefeller fathered numerous children with three women, and took the name Livingston after being indicted for rape in 1849. One of those children was John D. Rockefeller, who became the world’s first billionaire after founding Standard Oil.
“When he wasn’t running away from them or disappearing for years at a time, [William Avery Rockefeller] would teach his children the tricks of his treacherous trade. He once bragged of his parenting technique: ‘I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make ’em sharp’ …
The world we live in today is the world created in ‘Devil’ Bill’s image. It’s a world founded on treachery, deceit, and the naïveté of a public that has never wised up to the parlor tricks that the Rockefellers and their ilk have been using to shape the world for the past century and a half.”
The Birth of the Oil Industry
Another character with a similarly dubious background is “Colonel” Edwin Drake, an unemployed railroad conductor who managed to secure himself a job with the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company after running into the founders, George Bissell and James Townsend, at a hotel.
The title “Colonel” was bestowed on him by Bissell and Townsend, who thought it might help him “win the respect of the locals” as he went about the company’s business, collecting Seneca oil, which the company distilled into kerosene (lamp oil).
His mission was to collect enough Seneca oil to make the business profitable — a task that turned out to be more difficult than expected, as mere gallons could be collected using the standard collection methods.
Eventually, he tried drilling through the shale bedrock to reach greater reservoirs of oil, and on August 28, 1859 — literally the day he’d used up the last of his funds — the oil began to flow from the ground. And with that, a new industry was born.
It didn’t take long before homes and factories around the world were using lamp oil refined from crude, and prospectors from around the country flocked to Pennsylvania in search of the “black gold.”
Among them was John D. Rockefeller, a Cleveland bookkeeper who had two ambitions in life: “To make $100,000 and to live to 100 years old.” With a $1,000 loan from his father, “Devil Bill,” John D. Rockefeller set off to make his fortune.
The Standard Oil Monopoly
After a series of partnerships and mergers over a seven-year period, John D. Rockefeller eventually incorporated Standard Oil of Ohio in 1870.
“The next year, he quietly put what he called ‘our plan’ — his campaign to dominate the volatile oil industry — into devastating effect. Rockefeller knew that the refiner with the lowest transportation cost could bring rivals to their knees.
He entered into a secret alliance with the railroads, called the South Improvement Company. In exchange for large, regular shipments, Rockefeller and his allies secured transport rates far lower than those of their bewildered competitors.
Ida Tarbell, the daughter of an oil man, later remembered how men like her father struggled to make sense of events: ‘An uneasy rumor began running up and down the Oil Regions,’ she wrote.
‘Freight rates were going up. … Moreover … all members of the South Improvement Company — a company unheard of until now — were exempt. … On every lip there was but one word and that was ‘conspiracy.’”
By the time he was 40, John D. Rockefeller controlled 90 percent of the global oil refineries. Within another few years (early 1880s), he also controlled 90 percent of the marketing of oil, and one-third of all oil wells. His power and influence cannot be overstated at this point.
He had an international monopoly on what was to become the most important commodity in the world economy.
Following in Rockefeller’s footsteps were a handful of other wealthy families, including the Nobels, the Rothschilds, the Dutch Royal family, and millionaire William Knox D’arcy, who was the first to strike oil in Persia.
These early “oil barons” became enormously wealthy. And as billions of people became increasingly dependent on oil for virtually every aspect of life, they gained tremendous power and influence.
However, oil could have been replaced by other resources, were it not for the shrewd manipulation by these early “oiligarchs.”
The Death of the Electric Car, and Other Lucky Breaks
The advent of the electric light bulb took a good chunk out of the lamp oil market and temporarily threatened the oil monopoly. But lamp oil was quickly replaced by the need for gasoline to run the two-stroke internal combustion engine, invented by German engineer Karl Benz.
In 1888, Benz Motorwagen became the first commercially available automobile, and with that, the petroleum industry’s profits were again secured. But even then their ongoing monopoly was not guaranteed. The first electric car had been built in 1884, and by 1897, electric cars were gaining popularity in London. In the early 20th century, 28 percent of cars sold in the U.S. were also electric.
“The electrics had advantages over the internal combustion engine: they required no gear shifting or hand cranking, and had none of the vibration, smell or noise associated with gasoline-powered cars. Lady Luck intervened again on January 10, 1901, when prospectors struck oil at Spindletop in East Texas.
The gusher blew 100,000 barrels a day and set off the next great oil boom, providing cheap, plentiful oil to the American market and driving down gas prices. It wasn’t long before the expensive, low range electric engines were abandoned altogether and big, loud, gas-guzzling engines came to dominate the road …”
Interestingly, the event that made John D. Rockefeller into the world’s first billionaire was supposed to rein in his unbridled power. He’d come under intense scrutiny as his wealth increased and, on May 15, 1911, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Standard Oil a monopoly “in restraint of trade” and ordered its dissolution.
But by dissolving the company into multiple entities, shares of Standard Oil tripled in value, and in a few short years, Rockefeller’s worth equaled nearly 2 percent of the total U.S. economy.
“For the oiligarchy, the lesson of the rise and rise of Rockefeller was obvious: the more ruthlessly that monopoly was pursued, the tighter that control was grasped, the greater the lust for power and money, the greater the reward would be in the end. From now on, no invention would derail the oil majors from their quest for total control. No competition would be tolerated. No threat to the oiligarchs would be allowed to rise.”
The Continued Squashing of Competition
While the electric car had been successfully eliminated, thereby securing Big Oil profits, another competing resource was on the horizon: alcohol.
Henry Ford designed his Model T automobile to run on either gasoline or alcohol, stating that just about anything that could be fermented could be used for fuel, predicting the future of fuel was wide open to a number of alternatives. However, the oil industry succeeded in eliminating the competition yet again, this time by supporting the anti-alcohol movements and the formation of the Prohibition Party in 1869.
While Rockefeller avoided alcohol, his chief concern was not to uphold morality in the U.S. The prohibition served his agenda by creating burdensome restrictions on ethanol producers, and as ethanol became more costly, its attraction as an alternate fuel ceased.
Once the high compression engine was invented, car manufacturers started running into performance problems. General Motors diagnosed the problem, realising that the problem originated with the fuel. General Motors tried about 15,000 different combinations of elements to find a solution to the engine knocking.
Adding benzene from coal to gasoline was found to work. Ditto for adding grain alcohol. Adding 10 percent alcohol to gasoline raised the quality of the fuel, causing less knocking in the engine. It also had other benefits, including clean combustion, which eliminated soot emissions, and increased horsepower without engine knocking.
But as research continued, General Motors determined that adding lead to the gasoline produced “an ideal anti-knock fuel” — ideal mostly because manufacturing the lead additive, tetraethyl lead, would allow them to make the greatest profits. Were they to add alcohol to the gasoline, the oil industry stood to lose a large amount of petroleum sales, anywhere from 10 to 20 percent, depending on how much alcohol was added.
By adding lead, the oil industry had a product it could again control in its entirety. So Standard Oil partnered with General Motors, creating a joint corporation known as Ethyl Corporation. Leaded gasoline became the norm, and over the next 80 years, countless people were sickened and harmed by this neurotoxic fuel additive, thrust upon the people for no other reason than it created the greatest profits.
Big Oil Secretly Buys Up and Dismantles Public Transportation System
In 1936, Standard Oil and General Motors also took part in the reformation of public transportation. Only 10 percent of Americans owned a car, and most city dwellers relied on electric trolley networks. By replacing the electric streetcars with gasoline-guzzling buses, the oil industry secured an even greater foothold within the U.S. economy.
“The cartel had been careful to hide their involvement in National City Lines, but it was revealed to the public in 1946 by … Edwin J. Quinby … He uncovered the oiligarchs’ stock ownership of National City Lines and its subsidiaries and detailed how they had step by step bought up and destroyed the public transportation lines in Baltimore, Los Angeles, St. Louis and other major urban centres…
In 1947 National City Lines was indicted for conspiring to form a transportation monopoly and conspiring to monopolize sales of buses and supplies. In 1949, GM, Firestone, Standard Oil of California and their officers and corporate associates were convicted on the second count of conspiracy.
The punishment for buying up and dismantling America’s public transportation infrastructure? A $5,000 fine. H. C. Grossman, who had been the director of Pacific City Lines when it oversaw the scrapping of LA’s $100 million Pacific Electric system, was fined exactly $1.”
Next came the undermining of the railway system. In 1953, General Motor President Charles Wilson was appointed Secretary of Defense, and Wilson, along with Francis DuPont, Chief Administrator of Federal Highways, set into motion the largest public works project in U.S. history with the creation of the interstate highway system.
As a result, railway travel declined by 84 percent between 1945 and 1964, while private car ownership soared, and along with it, gasoline sales, which rose 300 percent in that same time frame. Similar social engineering feats took place in Europe, further securing the future of the oil business as a primary force to be reckoned with.
The report also goes into the details behind the gas shortages that sent the U.S. into a financial tailspin in the early 1970s, revealing how the secretive Bilderberg Group, created by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1954, successfully created a new financial system based on the petrodollar — a system that granted the oiligarchs unprecedented control over the economy.
The Rockefeller Transformation
In his day, John D. Rockefeller was a despised man. This all changed when he hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who essentially invented the public relations industry as we now know it. John D. was filmed handing out dimes to the poor, and was publicly portrayed as a kind and warm-hearted man. While hokey by today’s standards, such simple stunts worked. Yet, Rockefeller needed to go even further to truly gain the public’s trust.
“In order to win the public over, he was going to have to give them what they wanted. And what they wanted wasn’t difficult to understand: money. But just as his father, Devil Bill, had taught him to do in all his business dealings, Rockefeller made sure to get the better end of the bargain. He would ‘donate’ his great wealth to the creation of public institutions, but those institutions would be used to bend society to his will.
As every would-be ruler throughout history has realised, society has to be transformed from the ground up. Americans in the 19th century still prized education and intellectual pursuits … with a remarkable 93 to 100 percent literacy rate.
Before the first compulsory schooling laws in Massachusetts in 1852, education was private and decentralized, and as a result … a solid grounding in history and science was widespread. But a nation of individuals who could think for themselves was an anathema to the monopolists. The oiligarchs needed a mass of obedient workers…”
The Takeover of Education
John D. Rockefeller’s first great act of charity was the establishment of the University of Chicago, followed later by a $180 million donation to the establishment of the General Education Board. But contrary to what you might think, these acts of generosity were not to further education, but to control and impoverish it.
Frederick Taylor Gates became a trusted ally, and in “The Country School of Tomorrow,” Gates lays out Rockefeller’s plan for the education of future Americans:
“In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science.
We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.”
The Effective Strategy That Eliminated Natural Medicine
Other oil-backed schemes to mold and reshape the American education system followed, including a scheme to alter the teaching of American history to promote a view of collectivism, as well as a program culminating in the transformation of the practice of medicine.
Naturopathic-based herbal medicine was the norm, and Rockefeller set out to shift the medical industry toward using oil-derived pharmaceuticals. To this end, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was established in 1901, headed up by Simon Flexner.
“His brother, Abraham, was an educator who was contracted by the Carnegie Foundation to write a report on the state of the American medical education system. His study, ‘The Flexner Report,’ along with the hundreds of millions of dollars that the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations were to shower on medical research in the coming years, resulted in a sweeping overhaul of the American medical system.
Naturopathic and homeopathic medicine, medical care focused on unpatentable, uncontrollable natural remedies and cures was now dismissed as quackery; only drug-based allopathic medicine requiring expensive medical procedures and lengthy hospital stays was to be taken seriously …
The fortunes of Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefeller financed surgery, radiation and synthetic drugs. They were to become the economic foundations of the new medical economy … The oiligarchy birthed entire medical industries from their own research centers and then sold their own products from their own petrochemical companies as the ‘cure.’”
The Takeover of America’s Financial System and the Creation of a Food Monopoly
The financial power of these oil industry giants is by now near-unfathomable, but the aim was to control the entire financial system. This was effectively accomplished with the creation of the Federal Reserve, established in 1913 following a secret meeting on Jekyll Island, during which the details were ironed out. Attendants at this meeting included John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s father-in-law, Senator Nelson Aldrich, and various banking representatives.
Later, in the 1950s, James Stillman Rockefeller, the grandson of John D.’s brother, became the head of National City Bank, while David Rockefeller, John D.’s grandson, took over Chase Manhattan Bank. Still, they were not satisfied.
“Springboarding from success to success as they consolidated monopolies across every field of human activity, the oiligarchs’ ambitions became even larger. This time, their goal was to consolidate control over the very food supply of the world itself, and once again they would use philanthropy as the cover for their business takeover,”
The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Green Revolution that led to the introduction of petroleum-based agricultural chemicals, which quickly transformed agriculture, both in the U.S. and abroad. President Lyndon Johnson’s “Food for Peace” program actually mandated the use of petroleum-dependent technologies and chemicals by aid recipients, and countries that could not afford it were granted loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The “Gene Revolution” was next.
“The players involved in this ‘Gene Revolution’ are almost identical to the players in the Green Revolution, with I.G. Farben offshoots Bayer CropScience and BASF Plant Science mingling with traditional oiligarch associate companies like Dow AgroScience, DuPont Biotechnology and, of course, Monsanto, all funded by the Rockefeller Foundation …”
The Final End Game: Monopolizing Life
Those who are ignorant of history are bound to repeat it, and if this story tells us anything, it is that unless we realize what has been done, we’ll be deceived again and again, because the oil oligarchy’s end game is yet to be realised — if we let them.
“The takeover of education, of medicine, of the monetary system, of the food supply itself, showed that the aim was much greater than a mere oil monopoly: it was the quest to monopolize all aspects of life, to erect the perfect system of control over every aspect of society, every sector from which any threat of competition to their power could emerge … But the oiligarchs are not done yet.
Their next project, launched in the late 20th century, is almost too ambitious to be comprehended … It is about the monopolization of life itself. They have spent decades preparing the path for this takeover and marshaled their mind-boggling resources in service of the task. And the vast majority of the world’s population, still playing the shell game that the oiligarchs perfected and abandoned long ago, are about to fall right into their hands yet again.”
Hence; The most profitable industry
Just remember that health care is the most profitable industry in the world and as long as people are sick, people are making billions of dollars in profits.
The bottom line is this: The healthcare industry has no incentive for curing disease. If the healthcare industry cured disease they would all be out of business. Their focus, as unbelievable as it sounds,is to ensure more people get sick and more people need medical treatment. That ensures profits. It's all about the money! Hospitals, drug companies, and the entire health-care industry should really be called the "sick care" industry. This money machine does not make their profits by keeping people healthy but rather finding a sick person and then selling them their outrageously expensive drugs, surgical procedures, and other medical procedures. And they make over a trillion annually doing it. Folks, I've been in the boardrooms. I've listened to these people. I've heard CEOs of major pharmaceutical companies say things such as this: "I don't care how much liver damage this drug causes, get it approved by the FDA. Pay whoever you have to pay, get the lobbyists that you have to get, but just get this drug approved. Do it, and our stock price goes up threefold. We sell our stock and move on. And five years from now, when they find out about the liver damage, they'll take the drug off the market. But who cares, we'll have our money. Just do it."
Remember: Drug companies do not want people to get well. A drug company's goal is not to cure disease. If everyone in the world was healthy, the drug companies would be out of business. A drug company only wants to sell you more drugs. So here is how the cycle works.
The drug industry gives billions of dollars to medical schools. Why? So that their drugs can be put in the textbooks and doctors are taught to prescribe certain pharmaceutical drugs, thus guaranteeing sales of those drugs by the pharmaceutical company. Remember, in medical school doctors are taught two things: to prescribe drugs and to cut out parts of a person's anatomy, which is surgery.
When a doctor comes out of medical school, most people don't know that the pharmaceutical industry then pays that doctor to prescribe certain drugs. Often, this is done through "incentives." For example, if a doctor prescribes a certain drug to ten patients, he is given thousands of dollars in cash from the pharmaceutical company. Drug companies routinely give doctors all expense-paid trips to "medical conferences around the world. These medical conferences are really sales presentations by the drug companies, teaching the doctor about drugs and how to prescribe them, and giving financial incentives to prescribe those drugs. They are disguised as medical conferences. They are not. The experts at these medical conferences are compensated by the drug industry.
The FDA has now made as "law" the following statement, "Only a drug can cure, prevent or treat a disease." This is insane. Think about the ramifications. The FDA has now guaranteed and protected the profits of the drug companies! Only a patented drug, according to the FDA, can treat, prevent, or cure a disease. First off, we all know this is flat-out untrue. The disease scurvy, for example, which is simply a vitamin C deficiency, is treated, prevented, and cured by eating citrus fruit. According to the FDA's law, however, if you were to hold up an orange and say "This orange is the cure for the disease of scurvy," you would go to jail for selling a "drug" without a license.
Government Mandates of Drug Use. Another technique that the drug industry uses to make sure sales of drugs continue to increase is to get the government to pass laws requiring people to take drugs. There are three methods employed. First, pass a law requiring that children must take a certain drug, such as vaccines. Second, pass a law requiring all government employees and military personnel to take a certain drug. (Note the recent drives to have government employees and members of the military vaccinated against anthrax and small- pox.) Third, get the government to pay for drug usage for the poor and elderly through Social Security, When this happens...bam! Billions of dollars in profits.
When the pharmaceutical companies get politicians to require drug use or have the government buy drugs from the pharmaceutical companies as exorbitant inflated prices, the pharmaceutical companies make billions in profits and their stock prices soar. What is the incentive for the politicians to do this?
You need to know that politicians are making millions and millions and millions of in profits buying and selling stocks based on "insider information."
They are given the right to make profits when you and I are denied that right. This should be criminal! In any other venue people would go to jail.
oh by the way why pay for adverts if you make it a news story people miss adds and tied of them so if its news showing the research and claims that a new supper drug is being developed wham bang in the bank people go to thier GP and ask for it saying they saw this supper drug on the news.
The War On Drugs
According to Stanford University, the war on drugs started under President Richard Nixon in 1971, when he declared drugs America’s public enemy number one. The goals that drug war advocates aim to achieve are the prohibition of drug use and the end of the illegal drug trade.
The drugs targeted by this war range from marijuana to crack cocaine, and everything in between. Every president from Nixon through George Bush has been an advocate for the war on drugs, except for Jimmy Carter and most recently Barack Obama.
The policies enacted under the direction of these presidents are the primary reason why the United States only accounts for 5 percent of the world population, but accounts for over 25 percent of the world’s prison population.
The war on drugs has been a failure; drug usage has not ceased despite the billions of dollars spent every year to prevent it. The simple fact is this: people are always going to use drugs, just as sure as the Earth is spinning.It is past time to promote sensible drug policies that aim to promote health and wellness over punishment and imprisonment.
When discussing the war on drugs, one of the most important aspects to observe is which individuals and communities are hurt the most by unrealistic policies.
I am sure most people would assume the black and Latino populations are disproportionately affected by these policies. Well, reader, you would be 100 percent correct. The imprisonment rates among the white population are drastically lower than the two groups previously mentioned, even though drug usage and distribution among all three groups are relatively similar.
According to the Setencing Project, the US population is 60 percent white, around 18 percent Latino, and 15 percent black. Even though the white population is so much larger than the rest, they still have the least number of people in prison due to drug related crimes.
In state prisons, white people account for 38 percent and black people account for 40 percent of those imprisoned. The disparity is even larger in federal prisons, where blacks account for 40 percent, Latinos for 39 percent and whites for 25 percent.
Even though there are millions upon millions more white people living and using drugs in this country, more minorities face prison time for it, proving these laws hurt minority populations the most, even though they do not necessarily use drugs at a higher rate.
According to the Bureau of Justice, 2.7 million children grow up without a parent in the household due to the fact that the parent has been arrested for drugs. One out of every nine black children, one out of every 28 Latino children and one out of every 57 white children are affected by this issue.
These numbers show, yet again, how discriminatory the repercussions of these laws are. The laws themselves are unbiased, but the enforcement and profiling that occurs in regards to enacting them hurts minority communities.
If the war on drugs has been a failure, then what should we do about it? Some would argue for the decriminalization of drugs, but realistically that does not solve any problems. Why? The drugs are still illegal; you just face fines instead of jail time. Instead, I would argue for the full legalization of drugs.
Now, I know to most people that sounds insane, but just hear me out before committing me to a psyche ward: Should the government be in the business of protecting us from ourselves? Is it the responsibility of the government to make us better people, and to decide what is moral and acceptable for each individual life?
Many would say, no, the government should not concern itself with the private affairs of its citizens, so long as what they are doing does not hurt anyone.
Well, drug usage does not hurt anyone other than the person using the drugs. The argument can be made that it also affects the family of the person using drugs, but if you get right down to it, nearly every decision we make has some effect on the people around us.
If Joe wanted to eat a pound of bacon, no one would say that the government should stop him because of the negative health effects that would have on him, or that Joe’s health risks would impact his family.
However, if Joe wanted to snort cocaine, then everyone would proceed to assert their moral opinions, and condemn Joe because of how his usage might affect his health and his familial relations.
We cannot have it both ways in society. We cannot declare that we wish to have freedom in certain areas of life and then submit to arbitrary boundaries in other areas of life for the sake of the perceived public good.
Every action individuals make is going to somehow, some way, affect those around them, whether it be positively or negatively. It is not the duty of society or government to decide what actions should or should not be permitted based on effects that could result from the actions.
Individuals should be free to pursue what they so choose, so long as what they are doing does not interfere with the pursuit of happiness for those around him/her.
The last point I wish to make is this: by creating laws and punishments for drug usage, we are essentially turning millions of people into criminals. As previously stated, drug usage does not decrease under strict drug laws.
People will always use drugs, so what is the point in throwing them in a cage for it? Why not offer help instead of hostility? Instead of focusing on creating a culture that condemns certain activities and applies forced rehabilitation, we should focus on creating an environment where individuals have the knowledge that they can openly seek help if they so choose.
The people that the drug war tries to eliminate will never cease to exist. The only effective application the drug war has is forcing these people to live in the shadows, in unsanitary and unsafe conditions, where disease and death are more likely to occur.
The war on drugs does not seek to improve the standard of life for the individual that chooses to do drugs; it seeks to eliminate the individual by force and locking them away. There is something fundamentally wrong with that.
Spains Cannabis System.
Non Profit Cannabis Association. Italy is looking into going down a similar route as Spain and a lot of other countries where a non profit association can be formed with a maximum of 50 members producing a limited amount of cannabis for the association to share amongst members. Very strict rules are applied.
Portugal's Radical Drugs Policy Why Has The World Not Copied It ?
Susana Ferreira
When the drugs came, they hit all at once. It was the eighties, one in ten residents slipped into the deep of heroin addiction—bankers, university students, carpenters, socialites, miners—and Portugal fell into a panic.
The way Álvaro Pereira tells the story, it all began in the south. The eighties were prosperous in Olhão, a Portuguese fishing town thirty-one miles west of the Spanish border. Coastal waters filled nets from the Gulf of Cádiz to Morocco, local and international tourism was growing, and currency flowed with relative ease throughout the southern Algarve region. Portugal had emerged from a seventies full of massive changes: the death of long-ruling President António Salazar, the fall of his repressive government, the end of brutal colonial wars, and the bumpy return of thousands of soldiers and colonial settlers. Sunny Olhão, brimming with potential in this new, freer era, was a prime place for a young doctor to set up shop, and Álvaro Pereira moved south with his wife to do just that.
I met Pereira three decades later. He was sprightly and charming, with a trim athletic build, thick wavy white hair that bounced when he walked, a gravelly drawl, and a seemingly bottomless reserve of warmth. He addressed colleagues as “sweetie,” “darling,” “my beloved,” treating every doctor, nurse, patient, and passerby as though they were the highlight of his day. It had long been his way.
A general practitioner can get to know his community of patients fairly intimately in a small town. When he first arrived in Olhão, it didn’t take long for Pereira to steep in the details of people’s lives, their families, and their insides. He’d bump into patients at the café, shopping for fresh catch at the market, and on Sunday afternoon strolls along the boardwalk overlooking the Ria Formosa lagoon. His wife, an educator, came to know generations as students or parents at the local schools. When heroin began washing up on Olhão’s shores, tearing their lives and families and insides apart, Pereira was who they turned to.
“People were injecting themselves in the middle of the street, in public squares, in gardens,” Pereira told me. “At that time, not a day passed where there wasn’t a robbery at a local business, or a mugging.” Seemingly overnight, his quiet slice of the Algarve coast became one of the drug-use capitals of Europe. Local headlines terrified with news reports of overdose deaths, of rising crime. The rate of HIV infection in Portugal ballooned to the highest in the European Union. If the national average meant one in every one hundred Portuguese was battling a problematic heroin addiction at that time, the number was higher in the south. He described how desperate patients and families began beating down his door, terrified, bewildered, begging for help. “I got involved,” he said softly, “only because I was ignorant.”
To be fair, back then nearly everyone in the country was ignorant. First, in a literal sense: the authoritarian rule of Salazar, whose forty-year regime died a few years after he did in 1974, had suppressed education, thinning out institutions and lowering the minimum legally required schooling level to the second grade in a strategy to keep the population docile. Second, as it related to drugs: Portugal had missed out on the free-loving, experimental sixties, locked down under Salazar’s paternal thumb. Coca-Cola was banned under his regime, and owning a cigarette lighter required a license. When marijuana, then heroin, and then other substances began flooding in, the country was utterly unprepared.
Pereira tackled this growing wave of addiction the only way he knew how: intimately, and one patient at a time. The twenty-something student who still lived with her parents might have her family involved in her recovery; the forty-something man, estranged from his wife and living on the street, faced different risks and needed other support. Pereira experimented and reflected, calling on other institutions and individuals in the broader community to lend a hand, tailoring his approach to each person’s unique circumstances.
In 2001, nearly two decades into Pereira’s accidental specialization in addiction, Portugal became the first country to completely decriminalize the consumption of all illicit substances. Rather than being arrested, those caught with a personal supply might be given a warning, assessed a small fine, or sent to have a chat with a local dissuasion commission—a doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker—about treatment, harm reduction, and support services available to them. A bold stance was taken, an opioid crisis stabilized, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime, and incarceration rates. HIV infection rates, for example, plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015. The data from what is now a decade and a half of largely positive results have been studied and held up as example, and have given weight to harm-reduction movements around the globe. It’s misleading, however, to credit these positive results entirely to a change in law.
Portugal’s remarkable recovery, and the fact that it has held steady through several changes in government—including conservative leaders who would have rather ushered in a return of the War on Drugs—could not have happened without an enormous cultural shift and collective change of heart around how the country viewed drugs, addiction, and itself. In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies, and around kitchen tables across the country. Decriminalization as an official policy allowed for the pooled support and interconnection of a broad range of health, psychological, employment, housing, social, and cultural services that were already grasping to work together to serve their communities, like in Olhão. The language people used began to shift, too. Those who were referred to sneeringly as “drogados”—“junkies”—became known more broadly, more sympathetically, and more accurately as “people who use drugs” or “people with addiction disorders.” This, too, was crucial.
Portugal’s story also serves as a warning bell.
The Portuguese opioid addiction epidemic was contained, not made to disappear. The consequences of the eighties and nineties weigh heavily today, as the oldest generation of chronic users and ex-users grapple with complications that include hepatitis C, cirrhosis, and liver cancer. The long-term costs of problematic drug use are a burden on a public healthcare service that is still struggling to recover from a recession filled with cutbacks. Many Portuguese harm-reduction advocates have been frustrated by what they see as stagnation and inaction; they criticize the state for dragging its feet on establishing supervised injection sites and drug consumption rooms, for not making the anti-overdose medication naloxone more readily available, for not implementing needle exchange programs in prisons, and for not demonstrating the same bold leadership that led the country to decriminalize drugs in the first place.
In the U.S., nearly one in every hundred Americans struggles with problematic opioid use—a number that’s creeping very close to the rate of addiction in Portugal when the crisis was at its height. Overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death, and the leading cause of death period for Americans under fifty, with prescription drugs and the synthetic opioid Fentanyl to blame for much of the horrific jump. More than a quarter of global overdose deaths happen in the United States, according to the most recent UN World Drug Report, with an overwhelming fifty-nine thousand overdoses recorded just last year. Families and communities are being ravaged, as they were during a wave of heroin and then crack addiction in African-American communities in the 1960s and 1980s respectively—epidemics that were largely demonized, criminalized, and untreated. While President Donald Trump’s administration has largely favoured using the tough language and unforgiving measures of the failed War on Drugs, his stance softened slightly following an alarm-filled report by a special commission he appointed early in 2017. In a letter addressed to the president, dated July 31, the commission painted a stark picture: “With approximately 142 Americans dying every day,” the letter said, “America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks.” The commission recommended Trump declare a state of emergency. A week and a half later, he did, though it’s unclear what this will mean.
In the early days of Portugal’s panic, when Pereira’s beloved Olhão community began falling apart before him, the state’s first instinct—and it is nearly always the first instinct—was to attack. Drugs were called evil, drug users called demons, and proximity to either was criminally and spiritually punishable. The Portuguese government launched a series of national anti-drug campaigns that were less “Just Say No” and more “Drugs Are Satan.”
Pereira wasn’t the only one grasping for more scientific solutions. Treatment approaches and experiments sprang up throughout the country as doctors, psychiatrists, and pharmacists worked independently to address the flood of drug dependency disorders piling at their doors, sometimes risking ostracism or arrest in order to do what they hypothesized was best for their patients.
In the far north, psychiatrist Eduíno Lopes pioneered a methadone program at Porto’s Centro da Boavista in 1977. Better known by his nicknames—“Dr. Hero-in,” “The Methadone Man”—he was the first to experiment with substitution therapy in continental Europe, flying in methadone powder from Boston under the auspices of the Justice Ministry, not the Health Ministry. His efforts earned him vicious public backlash and the insults of his peers, who considered methadone therapy nothing more than state-sponsored drug addiction.
In Lisbon, Odette Ferreira (no relation to the author), then a sixty-something pharmacist and pioneering HIV-2 researcher, took on death threats from drug dealers and legal threats from politicians when she started an unsanctioned needle exchange program to address the growing AIDS crisis. The petite scientist—who today, in her nineties, still carries enough swagger to pull off long fake eyelashes and red leather for a midday meeting—started giving away clean syringes in the middle of Europe’s biggest open-air drug market, in the Casal Ventoso neighborhood of Lisbon. Along with clean needles, she brought in washing machines; collected and distributed donated clothing, soap, razors, condoms; and gave out fruit and sandwiches. When dealers confronted her with hostility, she snapped back: “Don’t mess with me. You do your job, and I’ll do mine.” She then strong-armed the Portuguese association of pharmacists to run the country’s, and the world’s, first national needle exchange program.
A flurry of pricy private clinics and free faith-based facilities opened throughout the country in those early years, promising detoxes and miracle cures, but the first public drug treatment center under the Ministry of Health—the Centro das Taipas, in Lisbon—didn’t open until 1987.
Strapped for resources in Olhão, Pereira was relieved when Taipas opened. He sent a few people for inpatient treatment there, hoping that time away from their dealers and triggers would help their recovery. Initially, the focus there was on abstinence. The psychiatrists who ran Taipas at the time surmised that drug addiction was evidence of a disturbance in one’s personality. “First you take away the drug, and then, with psychotherapy, you plug up the crack,” said Pereira. There was no scientific evidence to show that this would work, he said, and it didn’t.
Pereira sent other patients to Lopes’ methadone program in Porto, and found that some of them responded well to the treatment. There were two problems with this: Porto was on the opposite end of the country, and the Ministry of Health hadn’t yet approved methadone for use. To get around that—and to avoid the wrath of the psychiatrists at Taipas—Pereira sometimes asked a nurse to sneak methadone south in the trunk of his car.
Pereira’s close work treating addiction eventually caught the attention of the Ministry of Health. “They heard there was a crazy man in the Algarve who was working on his own,” he said, curling the corners of his mouth into a slow smile. Pereira relished that great Portuguese tradition of self-deprecation, and performed it with gusto. “They came down to find me at the clinic and proposed that I open a treatment center in the south.” That was all good and well, he told them, but he wouldn’t do it alone. He invited a colleague at a family practice in the next town over to join him—a young local doctor named João Goulão.
João Goulão was about twenty years old, sitting in a circle with friends passing around a joint, when he was offered his first hit of heroin. The young medical school student declined—he didn’t know what it was. By the time Goulão finished school, got his license, and began practicing medicine at a health center in the southern city of Faro, problematic heroin addiction had exploded in the Algarve. Tourist dollars and plentiful fishing made scoring dope easy, and the young doctor struggled over how to treat the addicts who began pouring in daily, looking for help. Like Pereira, he ended up specializing in drug addiction treatment by accident.
When the two young colleagues joined forces to open the first public treatment center in the south (though they’ve changed names and acronyms over the years, these centers are still commonly referred to as “Centros de Atendimento a Toxicodependentes,” or CATs), it was against the wishes of residents, and the doctors were still mostly winging treatments as they went along. Pereira and Goulão opened a second southern CAT, and other family doctors opened more in the north and central regions of the country, forming a loose network. It had become apparent that the response to addiction had to be as personal and rooted in communities as the damage it was causing.
After ten years of running the CAT, in 1997 Goulão was called by the state to help design, then lead, a national drug strategy. José Sócrates, then an adjunct minister to António Guterres—Portugal’s prime minister at the time, and today the secretary general of the United Nations—invited Goulão to assemble a team of experts to study potential solutions to Portugal’s drug problem. The resulting recommendations, including the full decriminalization of drug use, were presented in 1999, approved by the Council of Ministers in 2000, and a new national plan of action went into effect in 2001.
Today Goulão is Portugal’s drug czar. He has been the lodestar through eight alternating conservative and progressive prime ministers, through heated standoffs with lawmakers and lobbyists, through shifts in scientific understanding about addiction and in cultural tolerance for drug use, through brutal Eurocrisis austerity cuts, and through a delicate global policy climate that only very recently became slightly less hostile. He is also drug decriminalization’s busiest global ambassador. He travels almost nonstop, invited again and again to present the successes of the national harm-reduction experiment he helped birth to curious, desperate authorities from Norway to Brazil.
Portugal’s policy rests on three pillars: one, that there’s no such thing as a soft or hard drug, only healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs; two, that an individual’s unhealthy relationship with drugs often points to frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves; and three, that the eradication of all drugs is an impossible goal.
“The national policy is to treat each individual differently,” Goulão told me.
“The secret is for us to be present.”
The first official call to change Portugal’s drug laws came from Rui Pereira (no relation to Dr. Álvaro Pereira), a former Constitutional Court judge who undertook an overhaul of Portugal’s penal code in 1996. He found the practice of jailing people for taking drugs to be counterproductive and unethical. “My thought right off the bat was that it wasn’t legitimate for the state to punish users,” Rui Pereira told me in his office at the University of Lisbon’s school of law. At that time, about half of the people in prison were there for drug-related reasons, and the epidemic, he said, was thought to be “an irresolvable problem. A ‘civilizational’ problem.” He recommended that drug use be depenalized—distinct from decriminalization, which still carries the potential of an administrative penalty—and that it be discouraged without further alienating or bringing more harm to users. His report wasn’t immediately adopted—“the time wasn’t ripe,” the judge said—but it did catch the attention of Goulão’s commission.
“These social movements take time,” Goulão told me. “The fact that this happened across the board in a conservative society such as ours had some impact.” If the heroin epidemic had been restricted only to Portugal’s lower classes or racialized minorities, sparing the middle and upper classes, he doubts the conversation around drugs, addiction, and harm reduction would have taken shape in the same way. “There was a point where you could not find a single Portuguese family that wasn’t affected. Every family had their addict, or addicts. This was transversal in a way that the society felt, ‘we have to do something.’”
My parents first left Portugal for Angola in the early seventies. Salazar was still president, my big brother still a wriggling baby, and it would be another decade and an additional transcontinental move to Canada before I came along. Our parents brought us back for summertime visits every five years or so, adamant that my brother and I connect with our vast extended families, and that we touch the mountainous rock and soil of the northern villages that held our roots. Their once-vivid hope that we immigrants would return home grew fainter as the years passed.
Relatives whispered at first, and then spoke openly about break-ins, muggings, how so-and-so’s son is using, and Did you hear about your poor cousin? She’s gone and married a drogado. The word, heavy with that classic Catholic cocktail of judgment and pity, weighed on both sides of the family. I can’t recall when I first heard about drogados in the villages, but heroin must have arrived in the rural north around the time flush toilets arrived at my grandparents’ house, because I remember when both were still new.
Before the drugs, the hills were filled with the rumble of trucks carrying hefty blocks of granite from any one of the quarries scattered throughout the region. The quarries had long since closed, though. The jobs left with them. Most working-aged men followed, scattering from their families in search of work in Spain, France, Abu Dhabi, Angola. Some of those who stayed turned to heroin.
I remember when, decades later, the heaviness began to lift. On a walk with my grandmother a few years before she passed, high in the eucalyptus- and pine-fringed footpaths in the hills above her mountain home, she said what a relief it was to be able to walk without fear of being mugged. This was where the drogados used to come to smoke their drugs, she said, their used foils discarded throughout. The only smoke in the air now was from nearby forest fires, a lamentably regular summertime phenomenon. She casually mentioned how someone, one of many extended relatives I couldn’t recall ever meeting, had started methadone treatment a few towns over. It’s nice, she said sweetly, that drug-dependent people are getting help now.
When Pereira first opened the CAT in Olhão, he faced loud opposition from residents; they worried that with more drogados would come more crime. But in fact, the inverse happened. Months later, one neighbor came to Pereira for forgiveness. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but there had been three drug dealers on her street; when their local clientele stopped buying, they packed up shop and left.
The CAT building itself is drab, brown, two stories, with offices upstairs and an open waiting area, bathrooms, storage, and clinic areas down below. The front doors open every morning at 8:30, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Patients wander in throughout the day for appointments, to chat, to kill time, to wash up in the toilets, or to pick up their weekly supply of methadone doses, biweekly if they live farther away. They tried to close the CAT for Christmas Day once, but patients asked that it stay open. For many of them, estranged from loved ones and far adrift from any version of home, this is the closest thing they’ve got to community and normalcy.
“It’s not just about administering methadone,” Pereira told me. “You have to maintain a relationship.”
He brought me to a back room where rows of little canisters with liquid methadone doses were lined up, each labeled with a patient’s name and information. They all had the same amount of banana-flavored liquid, but a nurse explained that some doses were simply more diluted than others, depending on the individual’s needs—it kept patients from comparing their prescriptions. The Olhão CAT regularly served about four hundred patients, but that number can double during the summer months when seasonal workers and tourists come to town. Anyone receiving methadone treatment elsewhere in the country or even outside of Portugal could easily have their prescription sent over to the CAT, making the Algarve an ideal harm-reduction holiday destination. Sending patients to other countries, however, could often be trickier. They had a hard time sending methadone patients to France sometimes, the nurse said. Italy? Depended on the region. Spain was easy.
Pereira turned away from the methadone bottles to face me. “We’re going to have lunch now,” he announced, “and I want you to know that I’m going to drink wine.” He asked me, did I think alcohol was a hard or a soft drug? The question gave me pause. Wine was soaked into Portugal’s very identity, and an oft-quoted Salazar-ism equated it with patriotic duty: “Beber vinho é dar de comer a um milhão de portugueses,” or “Drinking wine provides food for one million Portuguese.” Alcoholism was also the country’s most alarming, destructive dependency, far ahead of heroin or any other substance. “That depends,” I responded, and he nodded.
“The wine that I drink is no different from the wine that alcoholics drink. The problem isn’t with the wine,” Pereira said. He repeated this several times, and phrased it in many different ways in the two days we spent walking and talking in Olhão: the problem wasn’t the drug; it was how the drug was used.
“I often say that the knife that slices the neck of the husband’s mistress is the same knife that peels potatoes to feed the child,” he continued. “The problem isn’t with the knife; the problem is in the hand that uses it. So, let’s not demonize substances. Let’s understand that there are little demons inside of people.”
My visit to Olhão in 2015 came years after that quiet mountain walk with my grandmother. It was my first visit back to Portugal since her passing earlier that year, and one of the few I’d made alone as an adult. Like many children raised in diaspora, visits “back home” can feel complicated. My first solo trip, in 2009, was also the first time I reported on drug decriminalization. Following a summer internship at the Wall Street Journal’s Southern Europe bureau, I filed a freelance story for the paper on how the quiet Portuguese drug experiment was faring. My article was measured in its praise, noting that it was still too early to fully understand what factors led to the epidemic’s stabilization. I quoted the 1999 government report presented by Adjunct Minister Sócrates, where he referenced the complexity of human dramas and implored that “drugs are not a problem for other people, for other families, for other people’s children.” The intimacy of his words stuck with me.
Back in Portugal once more, I wanted to have a closer look at what he meant. I spent weeks crisscrossing the country, visiting community-based programs that nurtured personal connections as a form of harm reduction, accompanying psychologists who spent day after day seeking out vulnerable users who would much prefer to stay hidden from the outside world. I drank coffee with users and activists from families that redefined the meaning of love and loyalty in order to stay together, and sat and listened in small towns that were still in the process of shedding shame and healing the wounds from several long, hard decades. These conversations flipped what I thought I knew about addiction on its head.
In vibrant Lisbon I spent my afternoons at a drop-in center called IN-Mouraria, in a lively neighborhood and longtime enclave of marginalized communities that was rapidly gentrifying. Between 2:00 and 4:00 p.m., the center provided services to undocumented migrants and refugees; from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m., they opened their doors to drug users. A staff of psychologists, doctors, and peer support workers—themselves former drug users—offered clean needles, pre-cut squares of foil, crack kits, sandwiches, coffee, clean clothing, toiletries, rapid HIV testing, and consultations—all free and anonymous. Rosy-cheeked youth stood around waiting for HIV test results while others played cards, complained about police harassment, tried on outfits, traded advice on living situations, watched movies together, and gave one another pep talks. They varied in age, religion, ethnicity, and gender identity, from all over the country, from all over the world. When a slender, older man emerged from the bathroom, unrecognizable after having shaved his beard off, the energetic young man flipping through magazines to my right threw up his arms and cheered. He then turned to the quiet man sitting on my other side, his beard lush and dark hair curling up and out from under a cap that said COSTA RICA, and said: “What about you? Why don’t you go shave off that beard? You can’t give up on yourself, man. That’s when it’s all over.” The bearded man cracked a smile.
I got to know some of the peer support workers, including Magda, slender with long, dark hair, who sweetly checked in every so often to ask about my reporting, and João, a compact man with blue eyes, who was rigorous in going over the details and nuances of what I was learning. Both had been longtime drug users, and they understood the language of the people who came in to see them. João wanted to be sure I understood that their role at the drop-in center was not to force anyone to stop using, but to help minimize the risks users were exposed to.
“Our objective is not to steer people to treatment—they have to want it,” he told me. But even when they do want to stop using, he continued, accompanying them to appointments and treatment facilities can feel like a burden to the user—and if the treatment doesn’t go well, there is the risk that person will feel too ashamed to return to the drop-in center, further marginalizing themselves. “Then we lose them, and that’s not what we want to do,” João said. “I want them to come back when they relapse,” João said. Failure was part of the treatment process, he told me. And he would know.
João was an active marijuana legalization activist, was open about being HIV-positive, and after being absent for part of his son’s youth, he was delighted by his newest role as a grandfather. He had stopped doing speedball after several painful, failed treatment attempts, each more destructive than the last. He had long smoked cannabis as a form of therapy—methadone did not work for him, nor did any of the inpatient treatment programs he tried—but the cruel hypocrisy of decriminalization meant that although smoking weed was not a criminal offense, purchasing it was. His last and worst relapse came when he went to buy marijuana from his usual dealer and was told, “I don’t have that right now, but I do have some good cocaine.” João said no thanks, but as he drove away he found himself beelining to an ATM, withdrawing enough cash for cocaine, and going straight back to the dealer. He had already rebuilt his life after his last relapse years prior: after he and his wife temporarily split, he found a new girlfriend, got a new job, and started his own business, at one point presiding over thirty employees. But then financial crisis hit. “Clients weren’t paying, and creditors started knocking at my door,” he told me. “Within six months I had burned through everything I had built up over four or five years.”
In the mornings, I went out with street teams to the crusted extremities of Lisbon. I met Raquel and Sareia—light of step, soft of voice, slender limbs swimming in the large neon vests they wear on their shifts—who worked with Crescer na Maior, a harm-reduction NGO. Six days a week they loaded up a large white van with drinking water, wet wipes, gloves, boxes of tinfoil, and piles of state-issued drug kits: green plastic pouches with single-use servings of filtered water, citric acid, a small metal tray for cooking, gauze, filter, and a clean syringe. Portugal didn’t yet have any supervised injection sites—although they are allowed under legislation, several attempts to open one have not been fruitful—so, the street team duo told me, they went out to the open-air sites where they knew people went to buy and use. Both are trained psychologists, but out in the streets they are known simply as the “needle girls.”
“Good afternoon!” Raquel called out cheerily as we walked across a seemingly abandoned lot in an area called Cruz Vermelha. “Street team!”
People materialized from their hiding places like some strange version of whack-a-mole, poking their heads up and out from the narrow gutters where they’d gone to smoke or shoot up. “My needle girls,” one woman cooed to them tenderly. “How are you, my loves?” Most made polite conversation, updating the girls on their health struggles, love lives, immigration woes, housing needs. One woman told them she would be going back to Angola soon to deal with her mother’s estate, that she was looking forward to the change of scenery. Another man updated them on his online girlfriend, how he had managed to get her visa approved for a visit. “Does she know you’re still using?” Sareia asked. The man looked sheepish. “I start methadone tomorrow,” another man said proudly. He was accompanied by his beaming girlfriend, and waved a warm goodbye to the girls as they handed him a square of foil for a swan-song hit.
The last stop was the once-notorious Casal Ventoso, the neighborhood Odette Ferreira had taken on decades before with her renegade needle exchange project, perched high on a lonely hill overlooking dry bush and freeways. Here we met Carlos, tall and trim with few grey hairs, his swollen hands the only sign of long-term intravenous drug use. Raquel passed him a few needle kits, and he tucked those into his canvas shoulder bag next to an extra pair of clean socks he carried at all times. He had learned to take care of his feet in the military, he said. Carlos pointed at mine—I was in sandals, feeling foolish next to Raquel’s and Sareia’s hiking boots—and warned me to be careful, for there were needles everywhere.
He turned to Raquel again, and told her he’d seen her at a bus stop a few days before. Raquel smiled brightly. “Really? Where?” “I don’t want you to take it the wrong way,” he said, “but if I see you on the bus, or on the streets out there, I won’t say hello.” Raquel’s smile dimmed.
“I know you in here. Out there, I don’t. I do this for you. I don’t want people to think badly of you for hanging around drogados.”
In the foggy northern city of Porto, I met another man named João, this one tall and nearly toothless, at a noisy café a few blocks from the apartment he shared with his mother. He came here every Tuesday morning to down espresso, fresh pastries, and toasted sandwiches with his fellow peer support workers from CASO, the only association by and for drug users and former users in Portugal. They met to talk out challenges, debate drug policy (which, a decade and a half after the law came into effect, was still confusing for many), and argue with the warm rowdiness characteristic of people in the northern region. When I asked them what they thought of Portugal’s move to treat drug users as sick people in need of help rather than criminals, they scoffed. Sick? We don’t say “sick” up here. We’re not sick.
I was told again and again in the north: thinking of drug addiction simply in terms of health and disease was too reductionist. Some people are able to use drugs for years without any major disruption in their personal or professional relationships. It only became a problem, they told me, when it became a Problem. CASO was supported by APDES, a development NGO with a focus on harm reduction and empowerment, including programs geared toward recreational users. Their award-winning Check!n project had for years set up shop at festivals, concerts, bars, and parties to test that the substance in the baggie or the pill in your hand was what you paid for. If drugs were legalized, not just decriminalized, I was told more than once, these substances would be held to the same rigorous quality and safety standards as food, drink, and medication.
“I love drugs,” tall João told me, his voice so deep I imagined his long body rattling with the rumble. “I never stopped liking drugs.” He enrolled in a state methadone program when he decided to quit heroin some years back, but still allowed himself the occasional bit of cocaine. And he only quit heroin, he said, to save his mother’s life.
“My mother is a saint,” he told me. “She gave me all the money I needed, even if she had to go borrow it.” João’s mother loved her son, but hated what the drugs did to him, so she had to make a choice—and she chose to protect him as best she could. Bills went unpaid, appliances were sold, all in the name of supplying the cash he needed to support his habit. Eventually, João’s mother began selling drugs too, and employed him and some of his friends in her business. She offered them hot lunches, regular pay, and easy access to the heroin and cocaine they were hooked on as part of her employment package, all in the name of shielding her son—and the sons of others, whose own mothers had turned their backs on them—from further harm. To these other mothers she was unforgiving. You’re a bad mother and I’m not, she’d sneer.
Twice, she was arrested and jailed. João was jailed four times, and when his mother fell ill during his last stint in prison six years ago, writhing and worrying from her bed about who would pay off his dealers and protect him if she were to die, that’s when something in him snapped: it was his turn to make a choice.
From Porto I took a train and then a car ride into the rural mountains, to the quiet village where my grandmother had raised her children, the air filled once more with the ash of forest fires. My relatives reacted to my cross-country reporting with amusement. You want to learn about drogados? they would say, using the word with gruff, warm familiarity. I can take you to meet some right now.
One of my uncles, more reflective than the others, told me after a late lunch one day about one family in particular, how their history with drugs was an open secret—everyone in the village knew—but he himself had never spoken to them about it directly out of politeness. Small towns are the same everywhere.
Later that same afternoon I found myself seated in a quiet living room, sofas soft blue and plush in the way of furniture that is rarely used, accidentally facilitating a woman and her granddaughter’s first frank conversation about addiction. The scent of chicken stewing in garlic and wine wafted in from the kitchen. The woman asked that I not use anyone’s name, so I’ll call them what they called each other: Grandmother and the Girl.
The Girl’s father grew up nearby, and trouble started somewhere around the time Grandmother’s daughter fell in love with him. “The day that he smoked for the first time—I think that he smoked it, I don’t know how these things work—he felt sick,” Grandmother told me. “He must have been fourteen or fifteen years old.” Was it heroin?, I asked. “Maybe it was that, yes. There’s cocaine and hero—heroin? It’s not the same thing?”
For the two decades that he struggled with addiction, Grandmother stayed quiet when items went missing from the house, when euros went missing from her purse, and when withdrawal drove her son-in-law to make wild and desperate threats. He was in a car accident, high and speeding after he’d stolen and resold goods to buy more drugs, and Grandmother bailed him out of jail. “My mother lent me money many times, and my sisters,” she said, her voice lowered. “It stayed between us. Not even my husband knows about this.”
When the Girl was still young, her parents moved to France. There, far from his friends, far from his dealers, far from the stresses of small-town life and the depressed northern Portuguese economy, they seem to have finally found a new sort of normal. The Girl has gone to visit, and says with some pride that both of her parents have jobs and a home with a beautiful garden. The Girl, still a student, stayed behind in Portugal with her grandmother.
Grandmother turned to the Girl: “There are a lot of people who die when they’re taking drugs? What is that called?”
“Overdose,” the Girl offered.
“Overdose! Yes! Right, right. It’s happened here.”
I asked the Girl how she and her friends in town viewed drugs, and she shrugged. “I think the people in my generation are more open. I have friends who talk about it, some who experimented but then stopped,” she said. “Here, where we’re very rural, you do one thing and everyone knows, and no one believes that people can change.” Her family may have tried to shield her from her father’s struggles with addiction, disguising car rides to pick up methadone as family field trips, but she knew. All the kids in school knew.
Grandmother had been listening to her intently. She leaned closer to her granddaughter, seeming to forget I was in the room for a moment. “I’m going to ask you a question,” she said: “Do you really believe that your father stopped using?”
“Yes, I believe that. Yes, I’m sure of it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.” The Girl paused, as though searching for the words to reassure her grandmother. “He’s very different.”
Grandmother leaned back, her brow furrowed, eyes still fixed on her granddaughter’s face. “He made a very big change,” she said softly. “I want to believe, but you’re always afraid.”
The Portuguese began seriously considering decriminalization in 1998, immediately following the first United Nations General Assembly Special Session on the Global Drug Problem, UNGASS, where the slogan was “A Drug-Free World: We Can Do It.” High-level UNGASS meetings are convened every ten years to set drug policy for all member states, addressing concerning trends in addiction, infection, money laundering, trafficking, and cartel violence. Latin American member states pressed for a radical rethinking of the prohibitionist War on Drugs at the first UNGASS, but every effort to examine public-health-rooted alternate models, such as decriminalization, was blocked. By the next UNGASS in 2008, worldwide drug use and violence related to the drug trade had ballooned. Once again, Latin American member states turned up the pressure. An extraordinary session of UNGASS was held last year in New York, but despite the promising signs of cracks in the Drug War façade and greater pushes for Portugal-style decriminalization, it was largely a disappointment—the outcome document didn’t mention “harm reduction” once.
Despite that letdown, 2016 did see a number of promising developments: Chile and Australia opened their first medical cannabis clubs; four U.S. states introduced medical cannabis, and four others legalized recreational cannabis; Denmark opened the world’s largest drug consumption room, and France opened its first; South Africa proposed legalizing medical cannabis; Canada outlined a plan to legalize recreational cannabis nationally and to open more supervised injection sites; and Ghana announced it would decriminalize all drug use—just like Portugal.
The biggest change in global policy climate in recent years has been the momentum surrounding cannabis legalization. Portugal’s official policy, meanwhile, has barely shifted since it came into force in 2001. Local activists have pressed Goulão to take a stance on regulating cannabis and legalizing its sale. For years, he responded the same way: the time was not yet ripe.
Here’s a second difficulty: legalizing one substance would call into question the entire structure of Portugal’s drug and harm-reduction philosophy. If the drugs aren’t the problem, if the problem is the relationship with drugs, if there’s no such thing as a hard or a soft drug, and if all illicit substances are to be treated with the same even hand, then shouldn’t all drugs be legalized and regulated?
The UN, longtime proponent of prohibition and initially hostile to the Portuguese drug experiment, is now headed by António Guterres—prime minister of Portugal when decriminalization went into effect. The current Portuguese prime minister is António Costa, formerly a very progressive mayor of Lisbon and Guterres’ minister of justice. As is the case in regional and national scenarios, massive international cultural shifts in thinking about drugs and addiction are needed to make way for decriminalization and legalization globally—a Drug-War-Free World. Despite loud calls for change in America over the years, the White House has remained reluctant to address what drug policy reform advocates have termed an “addiction to punishment.” But if conservative, isolationist, Catholic Portugal could transform into a country where drug use is decriminalized, where same-sex marriage and abortion are legal, and where the current agnostic leader of a left-leaning coalition government can put forward motions to debate legalizing euthanasia, sex work, and, yes, the national production and sale of cannabis, a broader shift in attitudes seems possible. Or at least it does not seem like “an irresolvable problem, a ‘civilizational’ problem,” as the as the constitutional judge put it. But, as the harm-reduction adage goes: one has to want the change in order to make it.
After our lunch at a restaurant owned by a former CAT employee—perfectly seared local tuna, fresh lemony clams, and, as promised, glasses of crisp vinho verde from the Alentejo region, all of Pereira’s choosing—the doctor took me to visit his baby. His decades of working with addiction disorders had taught him some lessons, and he poured all of his accumulated knowledge into designing a special, radical treatment facility on the outskirts of Olhão: the “Unidade de Desabituação,” or Center for Dishabituation.
Several UDs, as they’re called, have opened in other regions of the country, each of them differing slightly, but this center was developed to Pereira’s specifications to cater to the particular circumstances and needs of the south. He stepped down as director some years ago, but his replacement asked him to stay on to help with day-to-day operations; the few doctors who specialize in addiction treatment in the Algarve region are spread thin. At age sixty-eight, Pereira should be retired by now—and, boy, has he tried to retire—but Portugal is suffering from an overall shortage of health professionals, and there are simply not enough young doctors interested in stepping into this specialization. As his colleagues elsewhere in the country grow closer to their own retirements, there’s a building sense of panic that no one will replace them.
“Those of us from the Algarve always had a bit of a different attitude from our colleagues up north,” Pereira told me. “I don’t treat patients. They treat themselves. My function is to help them to make the changes they need to make.”
And thank goodness, he deadpanned as we pulled into the center’s parking lot, there is only one change to make: “you need to change almost everything.” He cackled at his own joke and stepped out of his car.
The glass doors at the entrance slid open to a facility that was bright and clean without feeling overwhelmingly institutional. Doctors’ and administrators’ offices were up a sweeping staircase, just ahead. Women at the front desk nodded their hellos, Pereira obliged with his “Good afternoon, my darlings,” and we began our tour.
The Olhão center was built for just under three million euros, publicly funded, and opened to its first patients nine years ago. This facility, like the others, is connected to a web of local, regional, and national addiction, health, and social reinsertion public services. It can house up to fourteen people at once: treatments are free, available on the reference of a doctor or therapist, and normally last between eight and fourteen days. When people first arrive, they put all of their personal belongings—photos, cell phones, everything—into storage, retrievable on departure.
“We believe in the old maxim: ‘No news is good news,’” explained Pereira. “We don’t do this to punish them, but to protect them.” Memories can be triggering, and sometimes families, friends, and toxic relationships can be enabling.
To the left, there were intake rooms, a padded isolation room, clunky security cameras propped up in every corner. Patients received their own suites—simple, comfortable, private. To the right, there was a “color” room, with a pottery wheel, recycled plastic bottles, paints, egg cartons, and loads of glitter and other craft supplies. In another room, colored pencils and easels for drawing. A kiln, and next to it a collection of excellent handmade ashtrays. Many patients remained heavy cigarette smokers; tobacco addiction, like alcoholism, has a troublingly large and socially accepted presence throughout Europe.
The schedule here was more or less the same every day: wake up, have breakfast, take meds. Then exercise or physiotherapy, followed by a group psychotherapy session. Lunch. After lunch, most patients gathered to smoke in a courtyard overlooking the basketball court and a small soccer pitch. Then they made art all afternoon, broke for lanche (a late-afternoon Portuguese snack), and, if there was more medication to take, a second round of meds. Patients were always occupied, always using their hands or their bodies or their senses, always filling their time with something. After so much destructive behavior—messing with their bodies, their relationships, their lives and communities—learning that they could create good and beautiful things was sometimes transformational.
“We’d often hear this expression come from the mouths of our patients: ‘me and my body,’” Pereira said. “As though there was a dissociation between the ‘me’ and ‘my flesh.’” To help bring the body back, there was a small gym, exercise classes, physiotherapists, a jacuzzi—an alternative source of pleasure to drugs.
“Our patient is challenged to construct a future,” Pereira continued. “Now that they have time, finally they have time, they have too much of it, and they have the freedom to choose.” He believed that each of them—human, imperfect—was capable of finding their own way given the right support. “You know those lines on a running track?” he asked me. “Our love is like those lines.”
I came back to visit the Center for Dishabituation the following day, and after clearing it with them first, Pereira said I could meet some of the patients. There was one man, a former patient who fell into using heroin again after twelve years, the bumpiness of a long financial crisis sending him back into a spiral. Another was a very poor, frail-looking farmer whose wife brought him in on the back of a donkey; she was desperate for him to get help with his alcoholism. Another patient, a young man, a longtime cannabis user, was there for the first time and didn’t feel much like talking.
“Now,” Pereira said, “you’re going to meet a woman who is interned here for the fourteenth time.” I thought I’d misheard. Fourteen? “Yes, fourteen.” She’d used a cocktail of alcohol, heroin, and cocaine for decades, her way of coping with a series of personal traumas, but her upper-class Lisbon family was opposed to her taking methadone or any other substitution therapy as part of her treatment. When I asked her why she wouldn’t consider it, she—blonde highlights fresh, nails immaculate, lipstick slightly faded after lunch—explained, “Oh, no, I don’t want to get addicted to another drug.”
While relapsing is often part of the path toward wellness, giving her the exact same treatment after thirteen failures was an error in Pereira’s eyes. “Isn’t it time to come to terms that this woman is going to need close monitoring for the rest of her life?” Pereira was exasperated. This, too, was part of the process.
He was firm, but never punished or judged his patients for their relapses or failures. Patients were free to leave the center at any time, and they were welcome to return if they needed, even if it was more than a dozen times. He offered no magic wand, no ready-to-wear, one-size-fits-all solution—only this daily negotiation for balance, a mark that shifted constantly: getting up, having breakfast, making art, taking meds, doing exercise, going to work, going to school, going into the world, going forward. Being alive, he said to me more than once, can sometimes be very complicated.
“My darling,” he told me, “it’s like I always say: I may be a doctor, but nobody’s perfect.”