Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal’s drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

It’s always seemed to me – especially now that the unhinged violence of the Mexican cartels is in the national news nearly every week – that the biggest weapon we could possibly use in the “war on drugs” would be to simply end it by making drugs legal, at some level. I’ve always wondered how the same politicians that constantly espouse their belief in the sacrosanctity and omnipotence of free market forces seem to believe that those same forces can be defeated when it comes to illegal drugs. No way. There’s no amount of manpower or dollars that can stop drugs from coming over our southern border as long as demand is as high as it is here. That much should be obvious by now considering that by almost any measure, the “war on drugs” is an abysmal failure and always has been.

Portugal’s case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world’s harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn’t having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal’s, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but it’s really hard for me to see American politicians going after the idea of reducing drug use through legalization/decriminalization anytime soon – even people with relative spine, like Webb. It’s just too easy in this culture of discourse-by-soundbite for their opponents to paint them with the traditional patina of political pussy-assness for the offense of admitting failure and trying a radical solution to a 30-year-old problem. Easier to make loud speeches and continue flushing taxpayer dollars down the toilet chasing “toughness”. I doubt anyone in Congress will have the guts stand up and take this on directly like tiny, broke Portugal did anytime in the next decade.

But here’s hoping.

"What's going on on public lands is a crisis at every level," said Forest Service agent Ron Pugh. "These are America's most precious resources, and they are being devastated by an unprecedented commercial enterprise conducted by armed foreign nationals. It is a huge mess."