Portuguese Drug Decriminalisation
Portugal stopped treating drug possession as a crime in July 2001 and treated it as a health matter instead. The problem it was answering was severe. Heroin use had exploded after 1974, when the end of the dictatorship and the return of some 800,000 people from the African colonies coincided with the sudden opening of a closed society; by the late 1990s perhaps one per cent of the population was using heroin, and Portugal had the highest rate of drug-related HIV infection in the European Union. A committee of doctors, lawyers and social workers reported in 1998 that criminalisation was making treatment harder and recommended decriminalising possession. The law did not legalise anything. Trafficking remains a crime with the same penalties; possession of up to ten days' personal supply became an administrative offence, and anyone caught is referred within seventy-two hours to a dissuasion commission of a lawyer, a doctor and a social worker, which can impose a fine, community service or nothing at all, and whose real purpose is to route people into treatment. The money saved on prosecution went into treatment, needle exchange, opioid substitution and reintegration programmes. The results are strong on the measures that matter most: drug-related HIV diagnoses fell by over ninety per cent, overdose deaths fell to among the lowest in Europe, and the prison population for drug offences dropped sharply. Overall use did not rise significantly, which is the finding critics predicted would go the other way. Several countries have copied parts of it.
- Year: 2001 CE
- Category: Political
