Portugal Decriminalized Drugs, But I Can’t Buy a Gummy

Let’s get the headline out of the way. Portugal decriminalized the possession and personal use of every illegal substance known to pharmacology in 2001. Heroin. Cocaine. Methamphetamine. MDMA. You can walk along the Cais da Ribeira with a personal supply of substances that would put you in a Louisiana prison cell, and the worst that happens is a conversation with a social worker and a small fine.

Cannabis gummies, however, are not available for purchase at the corner pharmacy. Or anywhere, really.

I live in Vila do Conde, in a country that looked at its catastrophic heroin epidemic of the 1980s and decided the problem was not criminal, it was human. It built treatment centers instead of prisons. The word “drogado” slowly, imperfectly, became “pessoa com distúrbio de adição.” For twenty-five years, Portugal has been held up as a model, with policy wonks descending on Lisbon to study it like a secular Lourdes. And yet: I cannot buy a gummy.

An hour north, across the Minho and into Galicia, there are cannabis clubs in Vigo. Not hundreds — that’s Barcelona. But they exist, they are open, and one of them is the Asociación Viguesa de Estudios sobre la María. The acronym spells AVE MARIA. María is slang for the product. So: a cannabis club in Catholic Galicia, named with a completely straight face for the devotional study of the Hail Mary. You ring a bell. Someone lets you in. The Atlantic is the same Atlantic you left behind. The policy is not.

This is Spain’s cannabis club model: private, members-only associations that collectively grow cannabis and distribute it among members. No storefront. No advertising. The legal theory is that collective personal cultivation is simply distributed personal cultivation. A legal fiction. It has held for a decade because no prosecutor has wanted the fight. The cannabis is, by all accounts, excellent.

Portugal looked at this and did not move.

I asked a local pharmacist about medical cannabis. She looked at me the way Portuguese pharmacists look at people who ask about medical cannabis — the way a librarian looks at someone who asks for a book that doesn’t exist, was never ordered, and whose author she suspects isn’t real.

There are no cannabis dispensaries in Portugal. Not one. The country legalized medical cannabis in 2018 — a prescription, a pharmacy, a physician who must certify that you have exhausted every other treatment option first. The bar is not self-certification. The bar is demonstrating, to a skeptical GP, that nothing else worked. Most people don’t clear it. Most people don’t try.

Portugal grows medical cannabis. Processes it. Quality-controls it. Ships it north. It is Europe’s largest cannabis exporter — more than 32 tonnes in 2024, bound mostly for Germany, Spain, and Poland. Portuguese cannabis leaves in refrigerated containers for Berlin while Portuguese patients are still arguing with their doctors.

Vigo is an hour away. An hour. Across the Minho. Different country, different policy.

The rest of Europe is not much better.

Europe has solved this in the way Europe solves many things: partially, inconsistently, and with impressive paperwork. Germany has legalized cannabis but is still figuring out how to sell it. Amsterdam has tolerated it for decades while pretending not to know where it comes from. Switzerland runs pilot programs for registered residents. Malta has associations. No one has built a normal store.

In its 2025 report, the EU’s own drug agency put the continent’s illegal cannabis retail market at a minimum of €12.1 billion a year. That is Europe’s cannabis retail infrastructure: €12.1 billion, unregulated, untaxed, and functioning without permission.

Germany legalized cannabis in April 2024 and then discovered that legalizing a thing and selling it are two separate problems. It told its citizens it had legalized cannabis and asked for a minute.

That was two years ago. The 2025 election then handed Germany a government that doesn’t want to finish the job. No legal storefront is expected soon.

The gummy is available in Columbus, Ohio.

None of this is because the experiment failed. It worked — overdoses down, HIV down, prisons emptier, use no higher than before. It is the rare drug policy that is morally coherent. Which is what makes the rest of it so strange: the country that showed the world how to think about drugs grows cannabis professionally, ships it to Berlin, and tells its own patients to try ibuprofen first. The most progressive drug-policy nation on earth is a short drive from a cannabis club named for the Hail Mary, and has decided this is fine.

What Portugal decriminalized in 2001 was the user — possession, personal use, the human being with a problem. It never touched supply. Twenty-five years on, the state licenses companies to grow pharmaceutical-grade cannabis for export, sets a medical bar most patients can’t clear, and leaves everyone else where they always were: buying from the same illegal market the reform was meant to retire. The €12.1 billion isn’t the absence of a policy. It is the policy. The restraint was never philosophical. Supply was never on the table — only the user ever was.

I live in Vila do Conde, in the country that did it best.

I still can’t buy a gummy.

Mark Blondin writes from Vila do Conde, Portugal, where he has been slowly working through the prescription process. His GP remains unconvinced.