Yes, certainly, Mr. Harris. Thank you for the question.
Portugal about ten years ago introduced a system of essentially a drug-dissuasion committee. Instead of being criminally charged for possessing small quantities of a drug or selling small quantities of drugs, people who were apprehended would be required to appear before a committee of three people and they would discuss the person's drug-use habits. Essentially, it's a non-criminal way of dealing with potentially problematic drug use. Let's remember that most drug use is not problematic in terms of its effects on society.
What they found was that actually drug use rates went down. That doesn't necessarily mean that the policies caused the drug use rates to go down, but that they did not explode upwards, as some people might have suggested. In fact, the program has been quite successful. The Economist magazine, as a matter of fact, did an article on it not too long ago. It sort of praised it as an alternative to the current prohibitionist war-on-drugs model, which, as you pointed out, has been a colossal failure primarily because of the black market in drugs that it creates, which makes it extremely profitable for insurgent criminal and terrorist groups that benefit from the drug trade.