 The next person I want to invite is a long, long friend, a long, long time ago friend of mine, Rui Quimre, and he's a person that puts me all the time in very bad situations, and it's not because he's taking drugs, you know. It's because it's something like people from the conference were asking him for a beer or a bio, and he sent us this to us. So this is the words that I have in my hand to praise and to talk about Rui Quimre. And that's why Naomi, she put me here because she knows that I know the guy a little bit. So Rui is a psychologist. He made his studies on justice psychology with me, actually. We are more or less not from the same year, but we are from the same faculty. Rui was a guy quite engaged with Gilles Deleuze. I was more Michel Foucault. And sometimes we have these kind of debates about controlling or those crazy machines of Michel Foucault, the crazy machines of pleasure. And I'm saying these crazy machines of pleasure because I think that Rui Quimre is a person that likes to go together with pleasure, and that's why he's taking drugs, I believe on that. But at the same time, he is a person that goes with thoughts, philosophy, with a person that likes to have a critical view or perspective about society and human relationships. And that's why I believe that Rui accepted somehow on this way to become the president of the Portuguese Drug Consumers Union called Casa, that lots of us, I'm pretty sure, we are proud of it because it is, for me, one of the major gains, inputs that we have, or outputs, sorry, that we have from legalization in Portugal and harm reduction is Casa. And because of that, because of the wonderful work that Rui and the other colleagues from Casa are doing, I invited him to come and say some words about your perspective on harm reduction. So welcome, good afternoon. Thank you, thank you for including the people and the voices of users trying to contribute. It's not just Casa, it's not just this group. It's the collaborative work that is possible now with the criminalization or much easier now with the criminalization. And yeah, lots of things have been possible thanks to NGOs and thanks to the strategy built in 98, 99. The strategy, I would say, it's translated in English and I repeat, it's a brilliant document at the time it was done. And I think that it's still very, very comprehensive and very actual. It proposes a complex look at this use of substances, managing of pleasures and so on, not seeing the human being as a body, just a biology, but a bio-psychosocial approach. And well, this kind of new line opened by the group of experts with auscultation to civil society opened the doors to this criminalization law in 2000 and then 2001, the building of the operative pillars or tools of harm reduction. So then Jerome Goulin and Sica have developed this operative implementation of the strategy and things for us users were going pretty well till 2008 when financial crisis but also another aspect happened. But with the financial crisis and the under-investment on civil society and the civil society, we had 45 years, 49 years of dictatorship, we have now 45 years of democracy, so almost equal. But we still have a civil society not so strong and always in need of structural dialogues and a great investment from the powers. So the financial crisis boycotted the possibilities of harm reduction to develop and Kassel is born in 2008 as an informal group. It's the first time that the group manages to weekly meet, debate the policy, see what was missing, read the documents and let's go to the neighborhood and see is it there, the national strategy, is it there, the harm reduction and in lots of these contexts we still don't find the state. So it's a long road to do. I think that we should re-read the national strategy and try to catch the spirit because for users was a great moment of hope, of freedom and the freedom not just to say no, no informed but to say yes also but informed and taking the risks that each person can manage. So this has been a marvelous encounter with a big family of harm reductionists, people that have a profound respect for human being on human rights. And I think that it's a new energizing moment for the state, maybe to re-read this reality because this year very close to places where we do intervention in neighborhoods with open scene of consumption, people still die of ODs with no necessity. So also the contexts of use are pretty different. It's pretty different to provide services for women, women that are engaged in sex work or that are engaged in disorganized use of drugs. And I'd like to highlight that this meeting also allowed for an interchange of a group of women in Barcelona run in a self-managed way, an underground safe consumption room and a safe space for women and that this interchange of two days and that this during the conference there will be this safe space for women and we will try to debate and what are the specific needs that are needed in different contexts. So I would like to see this kind of health issues not as a seek issue question, more of well-being and for that we have to build a road of a tailored intervention. If I am to work with the neighborhood in eastern part of Porto where the poor people are, I have to know that place, I have to know the characteristics and I have to build a tailored suit for that people. And I think I hope that this huge meeting, this encounter of wheels and this line of work that lots of people of very input, of input, of arm reduction have been doing for a long time, global commission, well, lots of... In fact, we have lots of evidences of what works, what doesn't work and it's more a matter of building our identity, our arm reductionist identity and begin to implement things. We have to go to action, we have to see if the documents that are produced in the government, in global commission, in different places where very good people are thinking about these issues, we have to translate them to reality and then monitor if that reality is being addressed and the needs are being well covered. So for CASO it's a great honor to be in this position. We are a very small organization that started as an informal group and just registered in 2011. And to be able to participate and contribute to solutions like the arm reduction, the drug consumption room for Porto where we participated in the consortium since the beginning. These kind of examples show or give me some hope that even being very little and it's still possible to influence policies and practices in the right direction. So I hope that this meeting brings lots of energy for the years to come because at the same time we live in a global context not so easy but with the short of, well, people see sometimes drug users' costs in these moments are more financial crisis. So I hope that with these three, four days of meetings and debating we can find together better solutions for the future world that we don't want more fragmented than it is right now. So welcome and thank you.