There are also clothes and food provided from donations from local people. There is an injection room and a smoking room, and showers for those who are homeless. The DCR operates first in the morning and then for several hours in the evening. However, experts determined that the mobile clinics weren’t enough. There are methadone vans touring the city and meeting addicts where they are based. The DCR is not the only service under Portugal’s health-centred drugs policy. This consumption centre has been open for just over two years and was positioned in this location because of its proximity to an area where addicts congregate. Reis is keen to stress that much has changed since the crisis of the 1990s. Portugal’s legal system has a so-called administrative sanction system, separate from its criminal mechanism, and the drugs policy falls into the former.Īccording to legal officials in Lisbon familiar with Irish law, the closest comparison here to these administrative offences would be our road traffic penalty point offences. It evaluates a drug user’s risk and offers them counselling and other supports.įor those at the highest risk, authorities can impose sanctions including fines and recommend treatment. It involves a psychologist, a social worker and a lawyer. Officials have said that the police paperwork for the referral is purposefully less complex than that for a court case.Ī “dissuasion commission” is akin to a clinical assessment. Personal consumption of drugs remains technically against the law but instead of appearances in court and a potential prison sentence, the police refer people they find to a “dissuasion commission”. Law enforcement officials The Journal met in Lisbon confirmed that they are still seizing tonnes of drugs annually. The Portuguese authorities have not stopped targeting organised crime. Anything above that is dealt with as an offence equivalent to Ireland’s Section 15 of the Misuse of Drugs Act – sale and supply. Personal use is not measured by the cost of the drugs discovered by police but instead is limited to the equivalent of a 10-day supply. If a person is caught by police in possession of drugs they are entered into a diversion programme. In 2001, the Government moved away from police, arrests and court and essentially decriminalised consumption of all drugs for personal use. Niall O'Connor / The Journal / The Journal Roberta Reis inside the drug consumption room. Reis, and all the other officials The Journal spoke to about Portugal’s drug policy mention the heroin epidemic of the 1990s that precipitated the country’s move away from a punitive criminal justice approach – treating addicts as criminals – to a more health-based, holistic policy. “This area that we are in here, it was the biggest drug supermarket in Europe, in the ’80s and ’90s,” Reis said, as she gave us a tour of the facility. Tents and makeshift camps are scattered across the steep slope rising away from the complex. A car is parked nearby which appears to be a makeshift home. Outside the facility on the street, a small group of people are sitting on the rough ground consuming drugs. Reis, the DCR’s co-ordinator, works for the non governmental agency (NGO) Ares do Pinhal which is state-funded to provide the service. We wanted to find out what the country’s health-centred approach means in reality, starting at the DCR. Views differ, but Portugal has often been cited, including at the assembly, as an example of a different and more radical approach to drugs. The assembly’s chair, former HSE chief executive, has said a “step change” in policy is needed.īut what could that change look like in practice? Planning for one centre has now been granted but the service is not yet in place.ĭebate is heating up about the future of Irish drug policy, with the Citizens’ Assembly on the subject due to resume its deliberations next month. The need for such a facility in Dublin has been fiercely advocated by those working with people in addiction, although the location originally chosen was opposed as unsuitable by many locally. In Ireland, this type of facility has become known as a “supervised injection centre” – and the subject of much debate. On Rua da Quinta do Loureiro, in a building in the style of a medical centre, The Journal met psychologist Roberta Reis and the team of nurses, psychologists and social workers who run the city’s Drug Consumption Room (DCR). Here, next to a busy motorway and under low-flying jetliners bringing in holiday makers, there stands a sprawling, multi-storeyed flat complex in the district of Casal Ventoso. THE COBBLED LANEWAYS of Lisbon are thronged day and night with tourists enjoying the bars, restaurants and historic sites of the seaside city.īut take a walk 40 minutes from the centre, past the picturesque tiled houses and steep cobbled hillsides, and you arrive at a different vista to that experienced by tourists.
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