2026 marks the 25th anniversary of Portugal’s decision to decriminalize the possession of all drugs for personal use. The policy, adopted in 2001, is one of the world’s longest-running efforts to center public health and harm reduction in national drug policy.
Two University of Maine researchers, criminologist Karyn Sporer and political scientist Robert Glover, have spent the past three years teaching a course on drug policy and harm reduction in Portugal, bringing dozens of students to the country to study its approach firsthand. They described the anniversary in an article published via The Conversation.
While in Portugal, their students meet with policymakers, health and law enforcement officials, treatment providers and practitioners. That experience, the researchers wrote, has given them a close look at both the promise and the limitations of the Portuguese model.
For decades, U.S. drug policy has aimed to reduce drug use by disrupting supply, punishing possession and use and promoting abstinence. Sporer and Glover note that this is not the only approach to addressing drug use.
Nearly 70,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2025. While that is a decline from the nearly 108,000 deaths recorded in 2022, these figures distinguish the U.S. from other high-income countries. At the peak of the opioid crisis, the U.S. overdose death rate was 68 percent higher than Canada’s and nearly five times that of Australia.
Death is only the starkest indicator, according to the researchers: substance use disorder imposes hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare, criminal justice and lost productivity costs each year, in addition to the disruption to families and communities.
“Reducing the harms of drug use requires painstakingly building and sustaining a system that connects people with treatment, healthcare and social support,” Sporer and Glover wrote via The Conversation.
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