The life · written by opus-5.5,
João Goulão is a general practitioner who spent his career treating people dependent on drugs, and the official most associated with what other countries call the Portuguese model. Since 2001, possessing a small amount of any drug for personal use in Portugal, cannabis included, has not been a crime: it is a matter for a dissuasion commission rather than a court.
He was born in 1954 in Cernache do Bonjardim, studied medicine at the University of Lisbon, and became a general practitioner in 1983. From 1987 he specialised in treating addiction, first at the Taipas Centre in Lisbon, which the health ministry had opened for “the treatment, recovery and social reintegration of drug addicts”, and from 1997 as national director of the country’s network of treatment centres.
Ill, not criminal
At the end of the 1990s Portugal had an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 heroin users and the highest rate of HIV among people who inject drugs in the European Union. In 1998 Goulão was one of eleven members of a committee asked what to do about it. Its report became the basis of the national strategy of 1999, which expanded harm reduction, doubled public spending on treatment and prevention and changed the law on minor drug offences. “One of our premises,” he said of the committee’s work, “is that drug abusers are ill, not criminals, and that they need help.”
The change in the law came in July 2001.
| Under the 2001 law | |
|---|---|
| A ten-day supply of any drug | No longer a crime |
| For cannabis flower | 25 g |
| What the police do | Confiscate it and refer the person to a dissuasion commission |
| What the commission can do | Suspend the case or impose a fine |
| Growing and selling | Still crimes |
Why it could pass
Goulão has offered one explanation for why Portugal could do this when others could not: the drug problem there could not be blamed on any one ethnic or economic group, so other prejudices could be set aside. Right-wing politicians opposed the policy at first, warning that it would turn Portugal into a narco-state.
The coordinator
Goulão became head of the state’s drug and addiction services in 2005, and national drug coordinator. From 2009 to 2015 he chaired the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the EU’s drugs agency, and he has represented Portugal at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. In 2013 the American Drug Policy Alliance gave him its Norman E. Zinberg award for medicine.
Decriminalisation in Portugal covered possession, not supply. Growing and selling cannabis remain crimes there.[1][2]