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.