Pubdate: Mon, 13 Aug 2001
Source: Scotland On Sunday (UK)
Copyright: 2001 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
Contact:  scotlandonsunday.com
Website: http://www.scotlandonsunday.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/405
Author: Ben Brown in Lisbon
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

FEAR OF HEROIN BOOM AS PORTUGAL SOFTENS LAW

Victor cannot quite believe his luck. For eight years he's been a heroin 
and cocaine addict in Portugal's Algarve, frequently arrested and once 
imprisoned. Now, even though he's been caught red-handed with a stash of 
drugs, he finds himself up before a social worker and a psychologist 
instead of a judge and jury.

This is Portugal's controversial new policy of tolerance in action: however 
hard the drugs you take, you won't be sent to jail.

"I was orphaned when I was 12," Victor tells one of Portugal's new drug 
'commissions', where addicts now go instead of the courts. "I'm 30 now and 
I've never had a job."

Elisabete Azevedo, the commission president, listens sympathetically. The 
only sentence she hands down is a course of treatment to help Victor, a 
handsome man though painfully thin through years of drug abuse, kick his 
habit. She promises he'll get help to find a job and to claim state benefit.

But will such decriminalisation be the saviour of Victor and Portugal's 
30,000 other heroin addicts, or will it only encourage them to take ever 
more of the drugs they crave?

"We have to stop treating addicts as villains and start treating them as 
victims," says Portugal's drugs tsar, Vitalino Canas, the architect of the 
new liberal policy. He explains his tolerance does have limits: you won't 
be sent to prison as long as you're caught with fewer than ten doses of a 
drug, whether it be cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine or heroin. But more than ten 
and you'll be classified as a dealer, who should be punished with all the 
wrath the state can muster. " They are the evil ones who are destroying 
lives," he says.

Canas does not pretend that his new policy is any sort of panacea and he's 
not arrogant enough to suggest other countries should necessarily follow 
Portugal's lead. But he does think fellow European nations should monitor 
his experiment, and perhaps try to learn from it. And with even some 
leading Conservatives suggesting cannabis should be decriminalised in the 
UK, the Portuguese road is perhaps of more than academic interest.

"Let's face it, we've lost the war on drugs," says Dr Carlos Fugas, a 
psychiatrist who's one of Lisbon's leading drugs counsellors. "Countries 
have tried zero tolerance and it hasn't worked. We've ended up with more 
addicts than ever. We have to look for new policies and new solutions."

Fugas and his team help addicts in Casal Ventosa, an area of the capital 
that's been nicknamed Portugal's drugs supermarket. Here addicts and 
dealers hang around on street corners, negotiating openly. A mother whose 
baby is asleep in a buggy is among those doing business. From their back 
pockets protrude rolls of tin foil for smoking heroin and syringes for 
injecting it. The police simply stand and watch, seeing little point in 
intervention. Some of the dealers have moved on to another area of Lisbon 
where the police dare not venture in: it is a maze of cul-de-sacs and I was 
told if I tried to do any reporting there I might never come out.

Some opposition politicians in Portugal are outraged by the new policy. It 
is pure lunacy, according to Paulo Portas of the right wing Christian 
Democrats. He claims the police force are confused by the experiment. What 
is the point of arresting drug takers, he asks, if nothing is going to 
happen to them? In fact there are some sanctions, but only if the drug user 
refuses medical treatment. In that rare eventuality, he or she may be 
fined, made to do community service work or temporarily lose their driving 
licence.

There are also fears that Portugal could become a drugs haven for foreign 
visitors . "We will not allow ourselves to become any sort of drugs 
paradise," insists police captain Antonio Matias, who's based in the Algarve.

Officers patrol the beaches on bicycles, looking out for the slightest 
sniff of a joint, while undercover officers mingle among the holidaymakers. 
" We are decriminalising drugs, not legalising them ," says Canas. "We are 
not going to start selling cannabis in coffee houses like the Dutch."

In the many seaside night clubs along the Algarve, there was little support 
for the new drugs policy among young foreign tourists. "It's one thing 
decriminalising cannabis, but heroin - I think that could be really 
dangerous," said one reveller from Holland. "It's sad and it's a big 
mistake," said a British girl. "It's bound to mean more drug taking."

The Foreign Office in London has hastily issued a warning to those who 
might be tempted to head for Portugal on the basis of its laissez faire 
attitude to drugs. Such travellers would, says the FO, be making a mistake 
because drug takers can still be detained. Still, if tourism to Portugal 
increases this summer, we may be able to guess why.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager