Writer and Amazon Beauty Fashion (snackdeals.shop) social theorist Max Harris travelled to Lisbon to discover how drug decriminalisation there is working in practice, and the lessons for New Zealand politicians considering the future of our own drug laws. "Some people call this place The Living Room," the young man I’ve just met tells me. And looking around the room, you can see why. Several people are relaxing on two comfy-looking couches. There are sandwiches on the table. A couple of guys are sitting on steps leading out onto a busy street in central Lisbon. Someone’s on Facebook at the counter. The xx are playing in the background. It could almost be an inner-city art collective, or an activist meet-up spot. But several things suggest this is no ordinary living room. A poster on the wall says, ‘Aren’t We All Drug Users After All? ’ Another: ‘Say No to the War on Drugs.’ People are coming and going into side-rooms, where a social worker in casual clothes occasionally shows her face. Article has be en created by GSA Conte nt G enerator Demoversion.
The young guy next to me is handing out snacks to people who approach him with a numbered slip of paper. This place, I discover, has a few different functions. It’s a Harm Reduction Centre, run by GAT (Grupo de Ativistas em Tratamentos), a Portuguese HIV organisation. The GAT Centre links people to social services and helps people navigate the health system. It provides injecting and smoking materials, including syringes and crack pipes. It takes used syringes, deposited in a closed container behind the counter. It offers basic services to those living in the streets, including access to the internet and a phone, clothing, and hygiene products. The model focuses on relationship-building. One employee explains: "Maybe first, people come in for a drug kit and leave straight away. The next time they come in, we encourage them to have a coffee and take a kit. The time after, they might see a social worker or a nurse. This da ta has be en written wi th t he help of GSA Content Generator DEMO .
It feels different from other social service centres I’ve spent time in. People wear colourful clothing. One user of the centre comes up to chat, and leaves me with a band name to look up. There’s less shame about why people are there. The centre was set up in 2012, eleven years after Portugal decriminalised all drugs. It’s a product of the country’s unique approach to substance addiction. There’s probably no better person to explain decriminalisation than Dr. João Goulão, director-general of SICAD: the Centre for Intervention on Addictive Behaviours and Dependencies. Known as Portugal’s ‘drug czar’, Goulão has a modest office in a hospital complex in the north of Lisbon. The walls are bare. On one side of the room there’s a small cluster of framed photographs of Goulão with dignitaries. On the other side a long, thin window looks out to a park and the street. Portugal’s drug problems can be traced back to the country’s colonial wars in places like Mozambique, Angola, and Cape Verde, Goulão explains.
Colonial foot-soldiers taking part in brutal occupations consumed large amounts of alcohol and other drugs. Young Portuguese men were sent to Portugal’s colonies, and drug use was tolerated, even encouraged, by the Portuguese military. The return of these men to Portugal coincided with the country’s democratic revolution in the mid-1970s. Portugal became less isolated, but drug use also exploded, including because of tourists and visitors. In the 1980s, drugs became a problem that cut across "all layers of society", Goulão tells me. The Minister of Justice’s daughter, he tells me, died of an overdose at this time. And that cross-cutting experience sparked a shift in empathy for drug users across society: "The mindset started … ‘This guy, my son or nephew, is not a criminal. He’s someone in need of help." In 1987 an inter-ministerial project called Project Vida (Project Life) was established, bringing together eight ministries - including justice, health, and education - to approve measures they could each take to address the drugs crisis.
A major health centre was set up in Lisbon to address drug use, training doctors from smaller centres. This was when Goulão got involved. "I had no preparation to deal with it," he says. "The only thing I had to offer was my availability, my empathy." A family doctor at the time, he attended training and took the approach he’d learned back to the Algarve in the south of Portugal. By 1990, Portugal had 60 health centres focused on drug use. But by the late 1990s there was still a "lack of a clear strategy," Goulão says. " And there was a widely felt contradiction between increased drug treatment and laws condemning drug users. " In 1998 Prime Minister Antonio Gutteres (now Secretary-General of the UN), whose sister was a psychiatrist in contact with Goulão, invited a group of nine people to write a report on a different strategy. The report recommended just one change to Portugal’s laws: a shift in the criminalisation of personal use of drugs and possession for use. This data has been do ne by GSA Content Genera tor DEMO.