Mr. António Manuel Leitão da Silva:

I thank the committee for having me at this high-level meeting. I apologise because English is not my native language. If members do not understand what I am saying, I ask them to ask me to repeat it. I will try to keep it simple.

When I was invited to this meeting, I made a kind of retrospective analysis of the experience in Portugal. As members will know, we in Portugal decriminalised drug use in 2001. If we compare the rates of drug use and drug overdoses in the past, before 2001, and now, we have an incredibly low number, even though the numbers are increasing again. I think the use of synthetic drugs and massive use of cocaine are European trends, but the experience we have is very promising, even though with the troika period in 2010 and 2011 we had a huge step back because one of our institutes was dismantled due to lack of funding.

One of the many questions members probably want to ask me is what the police role is in this new scenario. It is not actually new because we have been experiencing this for the past 23 years. One of the things I would like to emphasise, and I did so in my keynote that I sent to the committee, is that for the police it is a challenge to change mindset and not consider the drug user as a criminal but much more to view this as a problem with a social impact. I think this challenge for the police will take years to be settled. It is definitely not an easy job. From a police perspective, this new legislation, first of all, treats individuals in a much more combined perspective of human rights rather than just criminal subjects. That is the most important thing.

Second, the public health outcomes are enormous. First, we are treating individuals equally and, especially in terms of the public health system, we are able to get them back on track and into the system. That means we have a decrease in the number of infections, comorbidities and diseases, and the numbers we have are quite good, even though they are increasing now.

It is not easy for a police officer.

We are not electric switches. You cannot just change the police mindset in 2001 and then have a completely different policing approach. This requires probably a generational change in the police to get settled. I have been working in this area for 36 years, and one of these days I am about to retire. There was a long period of adaptation to see these individuals rather than as criminals. I am not saying they are not of criminal interest to police officers, but we have to consider that these individuals are much more of a social problem than a police problem. We have been working closely with, for example, the drug consumption room that opened two years ago in Porto. For years, we have kept this strong connection with the world of drug users. They respect us as police officers but not from a criminal perspective.

I have been a little sceptical about what the future will be regarding this huge volume of drugs that is coming to Europe. The effort made to repress this has to increase, not least in respect of the volume of drugs coming from South America and the new synthetic opioid drugs as well. Starting from the beginning is going to take time if Ireland decides to decriminalise drugs. In Portugal, we decriminalised but we did not depenalise drugs. It is not a crime but there is still a sanction, although this sanction is very mild and in most cases is not applicable. On the path through decriminalisation, it will take a long time to get the police mindset to adjust to this new reality.