According to the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008, article 364 of the Ecuadorian State does not consider drug use a crime, but only a health problem. [88] Since June 2013, the National Medicines Agency (CONSEP) has published a table listing the maximum levels worn by persons to be considered legal possession and that person as not a drug dealer. [88] [89] [90] “CONSEP established at its last General Assembly that the following quantities are considered maximum amounts for users: 10 grams of marijuana or hashish, 4 grams of opiates, 100 milligrams of heroin, 5 grams of cocaine, 0.020 milligrams of LSD and 80 milligrams of methamphetamine or MDMA.” [91] With the main objective of extending social and “health” protection for drug users, which was successful, Portugal decriminalized drug use in 2000. Article 28° of the new Law No. Law 30/2000 on repealed standards clearly stipulates that Article 40° (Legislative Decree No. 15/93) on the offence of drug use will be different (except with regard to cultivation) as well as other provisions incompatible with the current regulations. Drug use became an administratively punishable offense, but not a crime, and was placed under the jurisdiction of the Commissions for the Deterrence of Drug Addiction, created by Legislative Decree No. 130 -A / 2001 (January 23, 2001). The PDPM is consistent with the conviction that the war on drugs has failed and is therefore committed to ensuring greater respect for the rights of drug users; and it is also in line with broader European and global trends towards policies that reduce penalties for drug use [6]. Drug policy reform in Portugal included extensive needle and syringe exchange programmes aimed at reducing the risk of infection among injecting drug users. In 2001, there were 1,287 new HIV diagnoses in Portugal due to injecting drug use.30 In 2001 and 2002, injecting drug use accounted for more than 50% of all new HIV diagnoses in the EU, although only 2% of the EU population was affected. In 2019, it accounted for only 1.68% of the EU total, with only 16 new diagnoses.
While HIV diagnoses have decreased across Europe during this period, the trend is much stronger in Portugal. Due to its previously extremely high transmission rates, Portugal continues to have one of the highest HIV prevalence rates among IDUs in Western Europe (13%).31 However, this is still a significant decline since the turn of the millennium, when half of all new HIV diagnoses were due to injection drug use.32 AIDS diagnoses among people infected with injection drug use have also been spectacular over the past twenty years. decreased from 518 in 2000 to only 13 in 2019. Again, this is a stronger downward trend than the EU average: in 2000, Portugal accounted for 15% of new diagnoses in the EU; in 2019, it had less than 5%.33 Methodologically limited: Cato`s analysis relies heavily on lifetime prevalence data, which can be problematic when analyzing the impact of policy changes over the time periods captured in most of the studies cited in the report. In 2017, Fonseca spent three months in one of Lisbon`s anti-drug teams. He was interested in seeing and photographing the kind of help people receive in Portugal now that drug use is no longer a political priority. “America and Portugal are very different countries,” Fonseca says, pointing out that what worked in his home country may not be transferable to the United States. But at the same time, he says, there are lessons to be learned from the approach of treating addiction as a medical problem rather than a criminal problem. Since legalization, the country has established an online framework that allows consumers to purchase a variety of products ranging from herbs, extracts, oil capsules, and utensils. Most provinces also offer a place to shop through physical stores.
Portugal joined the war on drugs in the seventies, although drug use was not a relevant social issue in the country at the time, and legislators did not distinguish between drug use and drug trafficking. The utopia of a drug-free society has been maintained in Portugal and elsewhere by conservative discourses shaped in the field of law (political-legal discourses) and in the field of health (medical-psychological discourses), which function as vehicles of social control and converge in the understanding of drug use as a deviation from the norm, whether in the legal field (crime) or health (pathology). The Supreme Court, which considers that it was not a question of legalizing drug use, but only of decriminalizing less serious use, reinstates the offence of drug use (Article 40°, Legislative Decree No. 15/93) in cases where the quantities observed exceed those expected. Later, in 2014, the Constitutional Court did not consider the Supreme Court`s interpretation unconstitutional and confirmed its position (judgment no. 587/2014, 3 December). Although Judgment No. 8/2008 is not fully binding, it is currently used as a single instrument for judicial decisions. This position was considered controversial even by renowned judges [24], convinced that the actions of the Supreme Court were contrary to the spirit of the decriminalization law [25].
Full legalization is often proposed by groups such as libertarians who oppose drug laws on moral grounds, while regulated legalization is proposed by groups such as Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which oppose drug laws because they fail to achieve their stated goals and greatly exacerbate the problems associated with illicit drug use. But they recognize that there are harms associated with currently banned drugs that need to be minimized. Not all proponents of drug relegalization necessarily share a common ethical framework, and people may take this view for a variety of reasons. In particular, advocating the legalization of drugs does not mean consenting to drug use. [17] [18] [19] Because each country has its own regulations and most distinguish between different classes of drugs, it can be difficult to regulate which ones should be more accessible, as a particular drug that is criminalized in one region might be perfectly acceptable elsewhere. The 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances required signatory States to “take such measures as may be necessary to establish their domestic law as criminal offences” (art.