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They went much farther than what is being proposed here, but take a look at their results and give a fair opinion on them.

First, let me admit that I don't do "fair" opinions when it comes to drug use since I believe that moral laws shouldn't be based on statistics but rather on the morality of the activity itself. That seems to be lost in the conversation.

Second, we are talking Time, not exactly your more objective medium. For example, they chose to ignore Amsterdam because it would not support the agenda. It reminds me of an article that tried to show that Christians have a higher divorce rate than atheists. In order to do that, they cherry picked their data by selecting the state of Alabama, which had a higher rate of divorces in the church. Second, they didn't bother to discern whether the divorces occured before or after the person was "born again". This is a huge issue because, next to death of a loved one and before loss of job, there is the event of divorce that causes emotional distress. The evangelical churches in Alabama are more of the variety of "seeker-sensitive" so that they actively seek the distraught and broken in society with the goal of patching them up with Jesus. Ergo, a divorced person is far more likely to go to church to seek free counseling and join a "singles and singles again" social group with the intent of finding a better class of future mate than what they may have dug up in a bar or fresh from high school.

The Portugal story is lacking in much needed detail. Notice the slicing and dicing of the noted statistics picking certain age groups and manipulating the demos until they get the numbers that support the narrative. Time is well known for doing this sort of thing, and Cato is also well known for selective editing of data too.

If you want to impress me, I need a larger sample over time, and probably the most important yet probably elusive stat would be to measure the tonnage of dope smoked by that population over the course of time before and after the decriminalization took place. The "age of first use" stat is meaningless to me when one considers that one from a Western culture that would consider dope smoking is largely lawless and not intimidated by law enforcement. Sort of like the arguments 2nd Amendment types make when they point out that murderers aren't likely to go on the straight and narrow just because the city has draconian gun prohibition.

The gun laws didn't save the kids at Columbine, and drug enforcement by the local gestapo isn't going to scare young experimenters into a night just eating pop corn and drinking a Pepsi.

I can't explain the alleged drop in drug use other than the evidence-less guess that the taboo "forbidden fruit" effect is playing here. Many people like to point out Europeans aren't as anal about alcohol consumption by minors and thus there are fewer binge drinkers in that age group. I don't know if that is true particularly since kids in the US don't really have difficulties in acquiring alcoholism habit if they so desired.

Another thought is, that without the huge financial incentive, the marketing of drugs is lower in Portugal. Its sort of like trying to sell electronics to someone when they can buy it cheaper on-line. Why put in all the effort of convincing a buyer for so little reward?

I suspect that the reason why California is considering a state-wide decriminalization effort is because the lawmakers are dopers who see absolutely nothing wrong with getting high, and that by making it state-wide, it doesn't make for high density pockets of dopers who required even more social services with practically no contribution into the system that must pay for it.

As a Christian, the Bible condemns intoxication and likens it to witchcraft, so to me it not negotiable. If I didn't think that God's ways were the best ways, then I wouldn't be a Believer since to me my religion is Truth not a cultural superstition. This falls into the category of "before you tear down a fence, it is important to discover why it was put up in the first place." At one time we had no drug laws, then we had Prohibition, saw what kind of disaster that became and decided that we preferred to have thousands slaughtered on our roadways each year by drunk driving than the thought that an Al Capone might have the same political power as the despots in Chicago have right now. I don't know what the body-count would be if we liberalized our attitude about drugs. It would be great if we could use peer pressure rather than SWAT teams to achieve the results many of us desire, but for now, it seems that as long as the pro-drug abuse lobby continues to sing the praises of chemical addiction and the destruction of mind, body and spirit, there will always be that tension designed to tear society apart.