PORTUGAL ABANDONS HARD LINE ON DRUGS

Lisbon: Portugal has forced back the frontiers of drug liberalisation in
Europe with a law which, at a stroke, decriminalises the use of all
previously banned narcotics, from cannabis to crack cocaine.

The new law, which came into effect on July 1, takes a socially
conservative country far ahead of much of northern Europe in treating
drug abuse as a social and health problem rather than a criminal one.

Vitalino Canas, the drug tsar appointed by the Prime Minister, Antonio
Guterres, to steer the law into place, said on Thursday it made more
sense to change the law than ignore it, as police forces do in The
Netherlands and now experimentally in the Brixton area of south London.

"Why not change the law to recognise that consuming drugs can be an
illness or the route to illness?" Mr Canas said. "America has spent
billions on enforcement but it has got nowhere. We view drug users as
people who need help and care."

He admitted that Mr Guterres was taking a risk, but said Portugal had no
real choice. The police had stopped arresting suspects and the courts
were dismissing cases against users rather than apply legislation that
sent them to prison for up to three years.

Addict Margarida Costa, 35, who has found a home at a drug treatment
hostel, said jail never helped her. "In fact, I started taking drugs
there," she said.

She is lucky, having escaped from Casal Ventoso, Europe's worst drugs
ghetto, where until recently 800 addicts lived rough and up to 5,000
poured in daily to buy their fix. The Government is now bulldozing the
ghetto.

Luis Patricio, the psychologist who led the campaign to treat Casal
Ventoso as a public health problem, said most countries had the
relationship between drugs, crime and jail the wrong way around.

However, the right-wing opposition is predicting a boom in drug
consumption and the sudden arrival of thousands of hardened addicts and
thrill-seekers from around Europe.

But Mr Canas insisted he was not turning Portugal into Europe's drug
paradise.

"We are still fighting a war against drugs."

The police have been ordered to turn their attention to the drug mafias.