Podcast portugal

Portugal's radical policy change on drugs in the early 2000s led to significant improvements in public safety and health. Before the change, Portugal had the highest drug-related death rates in Europe. The shift to a harm reduction approach resulted in a decrease in drug deaths, HIV transmission, and drug-related prison population. Other European countries saw an increase in drug deaths during the same period. By treating drug users as full members of society and focusing on harm reduction, Portugal achieved positive outcomes. Investing the money saved from reduced drug-related issues into social services can address the root causes of addiction and create a better society. Hi, my name is Anna Sackley-Bowden and welcome to our podcast, Behind the Bars, The Human Cost of the War on Drugs. Today I'm going to be telling you about Portugal and their radical policy change at the turn of the century that had impacts in public safety to public health, from crime and incarceration to HIV transmission and overdoses. All right, let's get into it. So Portugal, like most countries, had a prohibitionist aim in their war on drugs previously to their radical policy change around the turn of the century. Now this policy change was put in place by a lot of political factors, the main one being the end of the dictatorship. Now before their policy change, there isn't a lot of data on drug use, but there are higher rates of drug-related deaths per million than any other European country. Spain had 8 per million, Italy has 19 per million, Netherlands 4 per million. Portugal has 32 per million. Now for reference, Spain's population is around 50 million people and Portugal has around 10 million people. So it's less than, it's around a fifth of the population, but quadruple the amount of deaths per million from drug-related incidences. In 1998, the arrest for drug use and possession to use, not selling and possession for sale but just personal use, rose by 235% of the 1990 figure and 45% were related to heroin. The CNDS, Commission for National Drug Strategy, formed due to rapidly rising drug rates of the 90s. Now at this point Portugal realized they had an issue and they needed to change their strategy. They went from a prohibitionist lens to a harm-reductive one. Harm reduction here is defined as activities that reduce harm to the drug-consuming individual and society. All activities that reduce supply and demand or improve the situation of consumers. Now they built, they had 8 structuring principles in which they built their strategy of harm reduction. The first being the principle of international cooperation, the second the principle of prevention, the third the humanistic principle, fourth the principle of pragmatism, fifth the principle of security, sixth the principle of coordination and rationalization of resources, seventh the principle of subsidiarity, and eighth the principle of participation. Now the heart of their argument lies in that they will regard drug users as full members of society and not declare unachievable goals such as zero drug use, but instead try to make things better for all segments of society. We can see the success of this policy in statistics. In 2001, Portuguese drug death rates were similar to the European average. While rates fell in Portugal following drug reform, they increased across the rest of Europe in the same time frame. In the first five years after the reforms, drug deaths dropped dramatically. There was some fluctuation, but since 2011, drug deaths remained below 2001 levels. The European average of people sentenced for drug offenses in prison has gradually risen over the past 20 years from 14 to 18 percent, but in Portuguese prisons, the proportion has fallen dramatically to 15.7 percent in 2017. Now take that back. If you remember, that was 40 percent before, now down to 15.7. In 2001, Portugal had 1,287 new HIV diagnoses attributed to injecting drug use. And despite having only just 2 percent of the European population, Portugal held over 50 percent of all new HIV diagnoses attributed to injecting drug use. In 2019, with only 16 new diagnoses, it had only 1.68 percent of the European total, from 50 to less than 2. Overall, it is clear that although we cannot eliminate the threat of addiction, we can reduce its harms drastically by changing our strategy from a criminalized approach to that of a public health issue. We can see this in rates of HIV going down, drug-related deaths due to overdose going down, and prison population is decreasing, or at least the drug-related prison population is decreasing. All of these changes actually make us money as a country, and what we can do with this money is if we put them into social services such as YMCA, after-school programs, daycare, tutoring, free and reduced health care, mental health services, this will reduce the causes of addiction that come from the root. Hopefully these changes will contribute to a more beneficial and connected society, and reduce the social ills that we've tried for almost a century, over a century, to get rid of.