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Reading between the lines of your post, I think you're suggesting that the Portugal experience is unique due to recent cultural changes, and we shouldn't try to apply these lessons elsewhere. However,

I know bad stories about drugs were all the time on the news. For instance, in my house my father always said: "If you ever try drugs don't ever come back." He never knew about my brother but there was a cousin in the family completely addicted, he died recently.

I'm on my twenties so I'd say I'm from the generation after my brother's. I never tried drugs but all my friends did, no exception. They just aren't addicted, don't know why.

This sounds very much like a typical experience in America.

I wasn't suggesting not trying it on other countries. I think it's a good move but my post was all about the reasons why drug use was so high 30 years ago.

This behavior was also common on the generation which was born during the revolution, like my brother. There was more information on the end of the 80s and teens were still trying soft drugs but starting to avoid hard drugs.

When heroin had a comeback in the United States in the nineties, my father said, "Of course heroin's coming back. All the people who saw their friends die of it are too old to have any credibility in youth culture."

It seems like all Western (or westernized) countries have to endure an era of "sex & drugs & rock & roll".

It's like puberty for countries.

I am also from Portugal. After reading your post, I was wondering whether we lived in the same country. I suspect I am from a generation younger than yours, which may explain a lot.

According to your rationale, oppressive regimes lead to increased drug abuse. Well, Spain also had a dictatorship for decades. The entire "Eastern Europe" lived under Soviet oppression for decades, too. The USSR didn't have a sexual revolution in the 1960s. I would love to see data that suggests that oppression causes people to go crazy and indulge themselves with drugs once they are "free". I am not saying it's not a possibility, but there's talk, and then there's data...

Almost all my friends in Portugal smoked Marijuana. They were not all that open about it, but everyone knew. By contrast, none of them ever touched cocaine or heroine. They were not stupid. Everyone had seen heroine junkies dragging themselves around town, their lives destroyed beyond repair.

Personally, I think the ones drawn to hard drugs are the weak people who can't deal with reality. Many of them die, but then... perhaps the purpose of their lives is to serve as warnings to others.

I am also from Portugal and I was thinking the same as you... is this the same country I live in? However, I am not from a younger generation. I believe the original post is biased towards his own experience/environment and generalizes a lot and that might explain it...

My small contribution to the discussion: Spain has one of the biggest problems with the youth drug use, I read somewhere that more 20-year people were consuming cocaine than 21-25 combined. I share that generation and I see the same problem here in Portugal.

My experience tells me that things were worst some years ago, I remember lots of people were on hard drugs on my home town, sadly most of them died. Also the big drug ghettos in Lisbon almost disappeared. The thing is Portugal as a peripheric country is in a very peculiar situation and the regulation problem should be seen in that context. It is normal for Portugal to lead drug aprehensions every other year because it's one of the main drug gateways from Africa (Marrocos) and from South America and it's close relationship with Brasil.

But the spirit of the law doesn't convince me at all, there are lots of people living from selling drugs and from the stats like 50% arrested were in the 16-20 years range, mostly everybody consumes marijuana. The problem may not be the law, but the environment around the schools doesn't benefit from this law, this should be somehow compensated.

Nice to meet Portuguese people here! Would you bother to fill your details? Or contact me: jracabadoemgmail.com would be wonderfull to talk to you guys!

USSR et al have never needed drugs other than alcohol, which is still abused today in incredible volumes - please look for numbers yourself. Still, plenty of poppy crops were destroyed after 1985. Hemp was and still is popular in the southern parts of the Soviet bloc.

Russia is the largest consumer of heroin in the world.

> The entire "Eastern Europe" lived under Soviet oppression for decades, too.

Well it's not empirical evidence but Eastern Europe is colloquially known for it's vice in general - not specifically a drug problem, perhaps, but other similar issues.

However I would tend to agree with you it's possibly not a major cause. I suspect there was a sex/drugs revolution in a particular area of society - and this is where the gp's experience comes from.