Drug Decriminalization in Maryland Through an African Centered Research Paradigm- Analysis and Recommendations

marijuana was grown and used openly. Others maintained that with Portugal’s opening
after 1974, drug use was simply part of a large “package” of issues that it began to share
with other Western societies as the country, pursuing more multilateral cooperation with
other countries, became exposed to new ideas, trends, and fashions.
After a half century of isolation, the Portuguese were ill-prepared to confront the wave
of changes that came with greater openness in the late 1970s. They possessed no common
knowledge about drugs, especially the distinction between hard and soft drugs, what
problems different drugs carried, what health risks they presented to individuals, or what
kind of social problems they caused.
In the early 1980s, the most commonly used drugs in Portugal were hashish and
marijuana, but heroin had already appeared by the late 1970s. Heroin smuggled from
Pakistan and India through the former colony of Mozambique by Portuguese of Pakistani
origin was sold on Portuguese streets in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, when two
large gangs smuggling heroin through Mozambique were broken up, heroin started
flowing from the Netherlands. Because heroin smuggling in Portugal consisted of so many
small groups and individual smugglers, the authorities found it impossible to stop. Heroin
use was also changing at this time, as consumers started to smoke as well as inject the
drug.
In the late 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, drug consumption in Portugal
became a subject of social concern. Many people in Portuguese society concluded that the
country had a serious drug problem and high drug consumption. At the time, this
conviction was not based on any research on consumption, but simply general impressions
and anecdotal evidence. A likely contributing factor to these impressions was that drug
consumption in some districts of Lisbon and other bigger cities had become more open and
visible. A EuroBarometer survey conducted in 1997 showed that the Portuguese perceived
drug-related issues as the country’s main social problem. Four years later in 2001,4 when
the new law decriminalizing drug possession and use was implemented, drugs occupied
third place on the list of issues that gave rise to social concern among the Portuguese.
(ibid).
Domosławski inclusion of Pakistani and Mozambique being seen as the progenitors of a heroine
epidemic in Portugal should be read within the analysis given by Netherland and Hassan. In this
context, Portugal’s understanding of addiction is deeply linked to narrative of protecting whiteness
from deviant otherness. It can also be read within the context of Karam’s analysis, with cannabis
and LSD seen as “mind expanding” “soft” drugs which can coexist with and maybe even facilitate
the functioning of whtie subjected rationally engaging with the world and affirming archetypal
white characteristics of self control, while heroine is seen as a drug which threats whiteness and
creating idleness and robbing its “victims” of their rational facilities (i.e. racially “blackening”
them). Finally, Portugal can be read within Alexander’s analysis of “psychosocial” integration and
socials structures as being the superstructure which creates the context for addiction. The transition
4151 Park Heights Avenue, Suite 207, Baltimore, MD 21215 • www.lbsbaltimore.com • (410) 374-7683