Why Portugal decriminalised all drugs
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2020
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the grip of a drugs crisis, the country took a radical approach in 2001 and became the first country in the world to decriminalise all drugs for personal use. Drug abuse and addiction began to be seen as a public health issue, not a criminal offence. Initial resistance to the policy faded after statistics proved that treatment, rather than punishment, was reducing the number of deaths caused by drugs in Portugal. Dr João Castel-Branco Goulão was one of the chief architects of the shift in policy. He's been explaining to Rebecca Kesby why Portugal had such a pronounced drug problem to begin with and how the shift in strategy helped to reduce it.
Image: Staffers interview a new patient in Lisbon, Portugal (Credit: Horacio Villalobos - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:29.2 | Hello and welcome to this witness history podcast from the BBC World Service |
| 0:37.8 | with me Rebecca Kesby. Today we're heading for Portugal which became the first country in the world to decriminalize |
| 0:45.0 | all drugs in 2001. |
| 0:47.8 | I've been speaking to a key architect of the strategy and looking at what prompted the radical policy. |
| 0:54.0 | So far, the war on drugs hasn't solved the problem. |
| 1:01.0 | Statistics show that every year there are more addicts and more deaths. |
| 1:07.0 | The reality is that putting people in jail for using drugs just doesn't work. |
| 1:14.0 | Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Portugal had a major problem with the abuse of illegal drugs |
| 1:21.0 | and specifically heroin addiction. |
| 1:23.4 | HIV infection rates as a result were among the highest in Europe |
| 1:27.9 | and nothing the authorities did in terms of tougher sentences or police |
| 1:32.1 | crackdowns was improving the statistics. |
| 1:34.8 | By the end of the 80s, three estimated we had 100,000 people hooked on Erwin, |
| 1:41.2 | that is 1% of our population. It's a huge amount of people. |
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