I find this a little confusing. The article says drugs are still illegal there, and people are still "caught" with them, but people are allowed to have them.

Can someone from Portugal comment on how clear the distinctions are over there? Is it actually confusing, with police still "catching" you using drugs, or is that just the article's terminology?

From reading this article it sounds like there's one foot in each camp, which could be pretty frustrating.

It's decriminalisation rather than legalisation. Basically there are allowed amounts for personal use, if you are caught with more you will face confiscation and perhaps prosecution. Otherwise you are just sent on your way with your drugs for personal use.

Portuguese here. From what I know people can have certain doses with them, as long as it is for own consumption. I don't know the correct values thou.

Says so right in the article: quantities greater than 10 days worth of private use...

Barring evidence of distribution or an admission otherwise, I wonder how they could ever prosecute someone for greater quantities. Suppose you're found with 100 tabs of Oxycodone. For a casual user, that might be a 3 month supply. For someone else, it may barely cover 10 days. This remains true for other drugs. I knew someone who used to take LSD every morning just so they could take a shit. I don't know what a 10-day supply looked like for them and that's pretty much my point, how will law enforcement know either?

They set actual limits, the 10 days was just a guideline they used to arrive at those numbers. Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/evaluating-drug-d...

Yes, from the article:

> 10-day supply of an illicit drug — a gram of heroin

I'm a heroin addict, and that would keep me going for about a day and a half ;(

Here's a graph of the unemployment rate in Portugal. http://cdn.tradingeconomics.com/charts/portugal-unemployment...

If you made a major public policy change in 2001 and then saw that graph, you might wonder if there was a link.

Except for the fact that unemployment rose in Europe in general in that time period. Greece and Spain both had peak unemployment at the exact same time as Portugal - despite both Greece and Spain not using Portugals drug policy.

https://www.google.co.nz/publicdata/explore?ds=z8o7pt6rd5uqa...

Sure, let's try to pretend there wasn't a huge international financial crisis AND that unemployment didn't climb rampantly in all southern Europe AND that Portugal was actually one of the less affected of those countries, so that you can keep your completely disproved preconceived bias intact.

Both the EU and the US began a recession in 2001.

So yes, you might wonder. And then your advisors would remind you that the financial world was burning around you.