Countries Name: Portuguese Republic

Full name: Jane Doe

Committee: Office of Drugs and Crime
Topic: A War against Drugs - Combatting the South American Drug Cartels

The drug cartels in South America have impacted a numerous amount of

things but particularly culture, consumers and the economy. Drugs have long
term effects, every country who has been a means of passage, a consumer,
producer or a distributor has suffered these effects. Portugal is one of the
countless countries who has. Unfortunately, since the 1980s (only 10 years
after the cartels originated in South America) Portugal has been forced to
manage with thousands of addictions, overdoses and the as non-stop
increasing crime rate, these are just a few of the things that the drug cartels
have brought to the Eastern Hemisphere.

“When the drugs came, they all hit at once,” says Álvaro Pereira, a
Portuguese family doctor who lived in the south at the beginning of the
international drug war. The South of Portugal was a key route to enter Europe,
as was North Africa, where the cartels could expand their business. In 1974
the Portuguese had just undergone a 40 year dictatorship, when this ended
they were exposed and vulnerable to everything, as they missed the mind-
expanding culture of the 60s. By the late 80s, approximately 1 in every 100
Portuguese people was battling a heroin addiction. Consequently, the rate of
HIV infection became the highest in the European Union. The Portuguese
continued fighting this battle, until the early 2000s.

In 2001, Portugal passed a law that decriminalized all illicit drugs including
cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines in addition to many more. This was a
surprise as a lot of countries took this as being in favor of the usage of drugs.
In fact, it was quite the opposite and this law was established to encourage
treatment if someone was battling a drug addiction. Therefore, if you were
caught using a small supply of drugs, the users were given a warning, advised
to appear before a local commission; a doctor, lawyer or a social worker,
where they could discuss possible treatments. Fortunately, once this law was
passed the opioid crisis which lasted almost 3 decades stabilised and Portugal
saw major drops in HIV infections, overdoses and especially in the crime rate.
In recent years we have seen other countries consider adopting this law, such
as Estonia. Other European countries have set a foot into the right direction,
not fully adopting but mostly using inspiration from Portugal by decriminalizing
the use of cannabis.

While the opioid crisis stabilised, it did not fully disappear because of the long
term effects, drug-users were being placed in hospitals for the damage that
these substances have done to their body. Portugal remains a key piece of a
billionaire business that moves in the shadows of the country’s ports, airports
and roads as it gives direct access to Europe. Yet as there was an
international drug war, these long term effects were, and still are, inevitable.
“Portugal’s radical drug policies are working. Why hasn’t the world copied it?”
(A headline of an article from The Guardian, posted on December 5th 2017)