But what’s been a beacon of hope for North American drug policy reformers could be regressing towards punitive approaches that Americans are all too familiar with. On September 30, Rui Moreira, the mayor of Porto, contradicted his past pro-harm reduction positions, like the ones made at the 2019 Harm Reduction International conference in his own city, when he endorsed reintroducing criminal penalties for drug use in public spaces during a municipal assembly meeting.
Drug decriminalization “is not possible,” he said in the meeting, adding that such policies have “consented” to illegal drug trafficking. The mayor expressed he is “a little tired of hearing just about the dignity” of people who use drugs, adding that the policy of decriminalization “simply does not protect the overwhelming majority of the population.” To address this problem that he says is “everywhere,” Rureira is advocating for the installation of over 100 new video surveillance cameras to monitor public streets in an attempt to clamp down on drug use.
(Dalgarno Institute – We may not be able to ‘arrest’ our way out of the drug mess. Be rest assured, we will never ‘treat’ our way out of it either – that ‘damage management’ model only generates greater (and almost invariably, irreversible) mess.
We can, in time, PREVENT our way out of it #preventdontpromote. We were told the legal and completely socially acceptable drug of tobacco would never be dealt with. But here we are with the lowest daily tobacco use in the world. As with the QUIT campaign #DemandReduction We need One Focus – One Message – One Voice in the illicit drug space and that cannot be ‘normalisation’, which is the current nefarious narrative being ‘pushed’ by the promoters and permitters of drug use in our social-political arenas.
Permission, NOT prohibition is putting an entire generation at risk, not only of acute harms, but chronic, often irreversible harms, that no amount of taxpayer funded ‘health care’ will rectify. It’s time to reduce demand, primary prevent and promote drug use exiting #recovery.
You community, your family and your children deserve this – not the harm facilitating agenda of the pro-drug minority.)
