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Photo: Alvesgaspar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In July 2001 Portugal stopped treating drug use as a crime. People caught with a small amount of any drug, heroin included, now go before a panel run by health and social workers instead of a court. HIV among people who inject drugs collapsed, overdose deaths fell to a fraction of the European rate, and drug use didn't take off. Twenty-five years on, the model is under strain, and the reasons are as instructive as the results.
By the late 1990s Portugal had an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 people addicted to drugs, mostly heroin, in a country of 10 million. In 1999 it had the highest rate of HIV among people who inject drugs in the European Union, with about 2,000 new cases a year (Wikipedia, 2026a). In 2001 and 2002, Portugal held 2% of the EU's population and more than half of all its new HIV diagnoses linked to injecting (Transform, 2021).
Arrests weren't stopping it. In 2001 more than 40% of people serving prison sentences in Portugal were there for drug offences (Transform, 2021).
One of the reform's architects is João Goulão, a family doctor. He qualified in Lisbon in 1978, became a general practitioner in 1983, and from 1987 worked with people addicted to drugs, including four years at the Taipas Centre, a Lisbon treatment service set up by the Ministry of Health (Wikipedia, 2026b).
In 1998 the government asked 11 experts, Goulão among them, to design a national strategy. He summed up where they started: "One of our premises is that drug abusers are ill, not criminals, and that they need help" (Wikipedia, 2026b). Parliament passed Law 30/2000, and it took effect in July 2001 (Wikipedia, 2026a).
That premise came easily to a country that already treated health as a right. Portugal's 1976 constitution, written after the 1974 Carnation Revolution ended nearly five decades of dictatorship (Wikipedia, 2026f), guarantees health protection, and in 1979 the country built a national health service "free, universal and accessible to all residents" (Wikipedia, 2026c). A people who had rebuilt their state around the idea that illness is everyone's business found it natural to put addiction in the same place.
The reform also carried people with it. A 2023 study in Addiction puts the success down to the way it was made: an electoral mandate, open deliberation, inclusion of the people who would run it, and evaluation from the start (Moury & Escada, 2023).
Decriminalised doesn't mean legal. Selling, growing and trafficking remain crimes. What changed is what happens to the person who uses.
Police stayed part of the system. In interviews with 19 Portuguese police executives, policymakers and officers, the police describe themselves as a route into treatment for people who are otherwise hard to reach, while still able to deal with disruptive public drug use and chase traffickers. Over time, police culture came round to it (Moniz et al., 2026).
| Measure | Around 2001 | Around 2019 |
|---|---|---|
| New HIV diagnoses linked to injecting | 1,287 | 16 |
| Drug-induced deaths | 76 (2001) | 6 per million adults, against an EU average of 23.7 |
| Sentenced prisoners held for drug offences | over 40% | 15.7% |
(Transform, 2021, drawing on Portuguese and European monitoring data)
The feared surge in drug use never came. Criminologists Caitlin Hughes and Alex Stevens compared Portugal with Spain and Italy and found no major rise in use, and falls in problem use, drug-related harm and prison overcrowding (Hughes & Stevens, 2010). Use has stayed below the European average (Transform, 2021).
One caution: Portugal expanded treatment at the same time. People in substitution treatment rose from 6,040 to 25,808 (Wikipedia, 2026a), so decriminalisation didn't act alone. Hughes and Stevens also found both sides of the debate stretching the figures, some calling it a resounding success, others a disaster (Hughes & Stevens, 2012). The fair reading is that removing the criminal penalty, backed by treatment, did not make things worse and helped make them much better.
The model has not stood still, and not all the change is good.
None of this shows the idea failed. It shows what happens when the health half of a health policy is starved. Oregon ran a version of the test: it decriminalised possession of all drugs in February 2021, then made possession of hard drugs a crime again from September 2024 after a public backlash (Wikipedia, 2026e). Decriminalisation on its own is a law change. Portugal's results came from the law change plus the doctors, panels and treatment places behind it.
Australia spends most of its drug money on policing. The breakdown is in Where does Australia's drug policy money go?
One place has started down Portugal's road. In October 2023 the ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise possession of small amounts of several illicit drugs. Police can send a person to a health education session or issue a $100 fine; supply remains a crime. A year later most people who use drugs in Canberra knew about the change, but many thought it meant drugs were now legal, or that police would do nothing (Sutherland et al., 2026). The law moved; the explaining hasn't caught up.
A third of Finland's prison places have no walls. How Finland went from locking up more people than Australia to among the fewest, and who gets in.
Photo: Professor Caretaker, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
New Zealand sends young offenders to a family meeting, not a courtroom. Ten trials show victims fare better and offenders reoffend less.
$5.45 billion a year: nearly two-thirds to law enforcement, under 2% to keeping people alive. Who gets arrested, and what Portugal and the ACT did instead.
Photo: Mike Knell from Zürich, Switzerland, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
