What works in Southern Europe is not at all guaranteed to work in America. Illustration by Noma Bar / Dutch Uncle

Nuno Miranda has been parking cars for thirteen years, most of them in a lot just below Belém National Palace, the eighteenth-century estate that serves as the official residence of the President of Portugal. Miranda, who is thirty-seven, is a lanky, amiable man, dressed in the style of hipsters the world over: a few layers of untucked shirts and skinny black jeans tucked into well-worn work boots. His dishevelled hair falls just below his collar, and by 11 A.M. one day recently the sun was bouncing off the thin gold chain around his neck.

Miranda’s “job,” like that of the now-banished squeegee men of New York, falls into the poorly defined space between labor and harassment. Nobody is required to pay Miranda, but he rarely earns less than fifty euros a day—a passable sum in one of Europe’s poorest countries. There is no fighting for turf, nor have the police ever tried to shoo him away. “I serve a purpose,” Miranda told me, waving a metallic-blue Volkswagen Passat into an open slot. “But I know I am lucky. I could have died long ago.”

Miranda is a heroin addict. Fifteen years ago, overwhelmed by depression and anxiety about the future, he turned to drugs. “Everyone did it then,” he said. “It was something I had to try. It made my life bearable—it still does. Though it can ruin people, too. I have seen that. When we started, we had no idea of the consequences.”

By the nineteen-eighties, drug abuse had become a serious problem in Portugal. The Lisbon government responded in the usual way—increasing sentences for convictions and spending more money on investigations and prosecutions. Matters only grew worse. In 1999, nearly one per cent of the population—a hundred thousand people—were heroin addicts, and Portugal reported the highest rate of drug-related AIDS deaths in the European Union.

In 2001, Portuguese leaders, flailing about and desperate for change, took an unlikely gamble: they passed a law that made Portugal the first country to fully decriminalize personal drug use. (Other nations, such as Italy and the Netherlands, rarely prosecute minor drug offenses, but none have laws that so explicitly declare drugs to be “decriminalized.”) “We were out of options,” João Goulão told me. Goulão is the president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, a department of the Ministry of Health that oversees Portuguese drug laws and policy. “We were spending millions and getting nowhere.” For people caught with no more than a ten-day supply of marijuana, heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, or crystal methamphetamine—anything, really—there would be no arrests, no prosecutions, no prison sentences. Dealers are still sent to prison, or fined, or both, but, for the past decade, Portugal has treated drug abuse solely as a public-health issue.

That doesn’t mean drugs are legal in Portugal. When caught, people are summoned before an administrative body called the Commission for the Dissuasion of Drug Addiction. Each panel consists of three members—usually a lawyer or a judge, a doctor, and a psychologist or a social worker. The commissioners have three options: recommend treatment, levy a small fine, or do nothing. Counselling is the most common approach, and that is what Nuno Miranda received when he appeared, in 2002, before the commission in Lisbon. “I was using drugs for five or seven years before that law passed,” he said. “Since then, everything has changed. Everything.”

In most respects, the law seems to have worked: serious drug use is down significantly, particularly among young people; the burden on the criminal-justice system has eased; the number of people seeking treatment has grown; and the rates of drug-related deaths and cases of infectious diseases have fallen. Initial fears that Portugal would become a haven for “drug tourism” have proved groundless. Surprisingly, political opposition has been tepid and there has never been a concerted repeal effort.

Yet there is much to debate about the Portuguese approach to drug addiction. Does it help people to quit, or does it transform them into more docile drug addicts, wards of an indulgent state, with little genuine incentive to alter their behavior? By removing the fear of prosecution, does the government actually encourage addicts to seek treatment? Unfortunately, nothing about substance abuse is simple. For instance, although many people maintain that addiction would decline if drugs were legal in the United States, the misuse of legally sold prescription medications has become a bigger health problem than the sale of narcotics or cocaine. There are questions not only about the best way to address addiction but also about how far any society should go, morally, philosophically, and economically, to placate drug addicts.

For Miranda, however, and for thousands of others who find themselves participating in civil life rather than disrupting it, such questions don’t matter. He has a wife and a sixteen-year-old son, and adores them both. “My wife would never let me use heroin at home,” he said. “I am not even allowed to smoke cigarettes in the house.” With a stable family, a regular dealer, and his spot in the parking lot, Miranda’s life has become orderly, almost routine. “This is because of the law,” he said. “We are not hunted or scared or looked upon as criminals,” he added, referring to the country’s addicts. “And that has made it possible to live and to breathe.” I asked if he had ever tried to overcome his addiction. He shrugged. “I guess I should,” he said. “I know I should. But I’m not sure I can, and it isn’t really necessary. I am lucky to live in a society that has accepted the fact that drugs and addiction are part of life.”

In 1974, after decades of authoritarian rule, a left-leaning faction of the Portuguese military led a coup that subsequently became known as the Carnation Revolution. Suddenly, a closed society became a boisterous democracy, and Portugal began to face enormous social, economic, and political challenges. As one of its first acts, the new government granted independence to Angola, Mozambique, and other colonies. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese citizens returned from abroad, adding to the social tumult. “We had a tough regime for forty-eight years and we were a closed society, and this was particularly true for young people,” Goulão said as we sat in his airy Lisbon office. Pictures of foreign dignitaries lined the walls. “We were completely isolated from other parts of the world—the hippies in San Francisco, the students in France in the sixties. Faint echoes reached our shores, but nothing really sunk in.”

In the United States, as in many European countries, the acceptability of drug use—and its consequences—had been debated extensively. But in Portugal, Goulão said, “the issue was never discussed.” As international drug traffickers discovered a new market in Lisbon, they also realized that the Iberian Peninsula was an ideal gateway to Europe. Portugal became a transit point for the distribution of cocaine from South America, heroin from Spain, and hashish and marijuana from Morocco and other African countries. (That has not changed. Goulão’s institute estimates that seventy-seven per cent of the drugs seized in Portugal are destined for other countries.)

“It spread very fast,” Goulão said. “We had an extremely low prevalence of drug use compared with other countries, but then all at once the gap between occasional users and people with a problem began to disappear.” By the nineteen-eighties, after the initial years of openness and experimentation, the government panicked and began running extremely harsh advertisements on television equating drug use with madness, evil, and crime.