Brian Mann covers the US opioid and fentanyl crisis for NPR and that means he talks to a lot of people struggling with addiction and he hears lots of stories like this one from harm Reduction Activist Louise Vincent.

We've had an entire community swept away.

He can't even think of all the people that I know that have died.

I mean, so many people are dead my own my daughter died our mentors are dead I can barely

stand to be be here sometimes because of all the trauma and all the people that we've lost

overdoses killed more Americans than ever last year, more than 112,000.

That's why what Mann learned on a recent reporting trip to Portugal is striking.

Cocaine is my drug, but I smoke brown.

Brian met Lilliana Sanjos outside a government-run drug consumption clinic in Lisbon. The brown

she's talking about is a form of heroin she buys on the street. But here's where

the picture starts to look a lot different than here in the US. Santo says she's never

lost anyone to drugs. Have you had friends overdose? No. Have you overdosed? No. No.

No. This is why Brian was in Portugal. The country has taken a radically different approach to drugs,

decriminalizing small amounts and publicly funding addiction services, including sites where people can use drugs like

crack and heroin. And it's worked. People in Portugal are 45 times less likely to die from overdoses than in the US.

The statistics really speak for themselves.

That's Miguel Monije, an anthropologist at the University of Lisbon, who studied

drug policy and addiction in the US and in Portugal for decades.

Someone who has a problematic drug use isn't someone who's a criminal or has a moral failing.

Rather than follow the US drug war model which focused on arresting people often

giving them lengthy prison sentences. Monich says Portugal prioritized health care.

There's someone who has a physical or mental health problem and that is a tremendous societal shift.

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