Ms Sinéad McCool:

This is from a pharmacy perspective in that we met with our Portuguese pharmacist colleagues via the Pharmaceutical Group of the European Union, PGEU. Their experience was very positive. We spoke about things happening in parallel. The background was that Portugal had a serious issue with opioid misuse in the late 1990s so the government came together to form a body to put this in place with the five pillars. It happened very quickly. We said we were quite used to people having great ideas but they are very slow to happen. If memory serves me, they said the whole thing was up and running within a year to 18 months, so it was a real eye opener for us to see that it did happen. Their piece happened quite quickly within those 18 months, so they would have had the resources put in place be they needle exchange or opioid substitution programmes. It was the resourcing piece. Overall, it was a positive experience and they were very happy with it and they could see other improvements. It facilitated working within the community. The community education piece happened because there was access to these services. There was access to needle exchanges. As was talked about earlier, these were mothers, sons, daughters and families. From their perspective, it was very positive.

I will not use the word "complacency" but the one thing they said was that it was so good that they almost forgot how lucky they were to have it. Again, this is a pharmacy perspective. They did talk about how if issues arose, they were referred to commissions and took on undertakings so that no further actions were taken. They did not have a lot of experience of that but they did feel that they got referrals to services via those. Again, it fed back into decriminalising the patient and getting him or her the care and supports he or she needed. At a point, their opioid substitution programme stopped because it had been a success and there was no need for it. The needle exchanges continued because, again, they are an outreach service and a way of engaging somebody and, hopefully, starting him or her on the path to considering engaging with opioid substitution and trying to cease drug abuse. That was the perspective from our Portuguese colleagues.