 Preživam, da bo mi počut, da so našem vrde, da je tudi je zelo počut, da je zelo počut, da je svoje zelo počut. Zato možemo da je vzelo počut, da je začela, da je podal za porut. Tako, našli. Mr. Rui Moreira, počut. Našto ne, Dr. Duard is the former coordinator of the Portugal National Program Against Tubercloses and assistant professor at the Institute of Public Health of the University of Portugal, Izpup, the Vice President of the International Union Against Tubercloses, a land disease as well as shared Tubercloses working group of the European Respiratory Society. Hakel, dajte služenju, a ne vostajte v teži. Thak'j, mladje. Potečno, srečenje, ko je. Však sem zelo, čeljite, da se razrečujem v现šenju. V 2019 hrvih vseh vseh vseh vseh vseh vseh. Prepočujem, Mr. Naomi Burschein, resekutiv, resekutiv delarstv, Mr. Joseke Roš, ki je moj fran in resekutiv delarstv, za časno poslednje, da je to v 2019 vsega resekutiv delarstv, in za vsega resekutiv delarstva organizacija. Prepočujem, da vsega resekutiv delarstv, Bread is opening ceremony with the High Commissioner of Human Rights. Mrs. Michelle Blanshi, with the former Portuguese President George Sampaio. With Mr. Rui Quimba Muraes, from Consumidoros Sociados Viving Organizados. And Mr. Alexandre Quintanilla, scientist and leader in the Portuguese drug policy reform. Over 4 days of presentations, workshops and networking events we expect a major reflection about devices for harm and risk reduction, that we consider essential in our policies. In the context of the related policies, the first national drug strategy, whose 20th anniversary we celebrate in the coming weeks, has provided a balanced approach between supply reduction and reducing demand in the context of the related policies. I remember that it was approved by the Portuguese government in 1999. These policies and this balanced approach to the illicit substances have been successful, and therefore we have extended the concept, not only to the controlled substances, but to all addictive behaviors. Portugal's approach is a well-known model of best practices because we are fully committed to the principle of drug control conventions based on principle of proportionality, respect for human rights, putting health and welfare in the center. Drug addiction and substance addiction is a health problem first and foremost. But we are still concerned about the future. We are not a country free of drugs, free of addiction, and mostly about access to legal substances, such as alcohol, tobacco, and other behaviors, such as gambling. The regulation of these access, which we can consider as an environmental prevention, is also extremely crucial and important to us. In terms of prevention and in the context of demand, we have several strategies and we try to go beyond mere information about risks and harms of drugs, but we want to favor the capacity of resilience and the capacity of making conscious choices about the behaviors we adopt. We try not to diminish our fellow citizens or use the connotation of certain behaviors as addictions or even scenes. We do not believe in just saying no. We wanted to help people understand why to say no. The strategy settles in several core values, of which I highlight the humanism and pragmatism as the most relevant and we heard about them today. If humanism leads us to consider the dignity of the human being in all circumstances and its condition as a citizen with rights and duties, pragmatism leads us to recognize that the same human being and the specific conditions is enslaved by dependence and inability to self-determine. It is fundamental that we support that same human being regaining the most basic levels of human dignity so that he can therefore make a conscious choice. We are attentive to the responses that other countries have applied and we also support the evidence that the EMC, the DEA, help us to compile. We have extended the range of responses. We have also advanced legislation in harm reduction, which gives space to find answers. We believe are the most appropriate to the problems faced as is the creation of monitored consumer programs. The success of these policies, like the needle exchange program, has contributed to a decrease in dejectable consumption, but we are also far away from being free of addiction. In recent years, above all in the aftermath of the economic and social crisis that has affected us, we have witnessed the recruitment of old consumption by injection. We therefore support the initiative of a consortium of NGOs supported by the Lisbon Center Council that allowed recent opening of the mobile monitor consumption space in Lisbon and now also in Porto, which will soon be followed by the creation of fixed space in Lisbon. And it's very good, very good for us all. Life is an absolute value that knows no borders, no differences. It's for the defense of a better life that we meet here. I want to warmly welcome you all here in this conference. I hope you all share your experience, share your knowledge. We all win with that. And I wish you a very, very well staying in Portugal in this extraordinary city. I must say this is my home, so I hope you like it as much as I do. And I hope you enjoyed the session. Thank you. Next up, it's my absolute pleasure to introduce you to Professor Alexandra Quintanilla. When we're looking for the people who could best tell the story of the Portuguese decriminalization model, his name came up straight away. And so I'm so excited to hear him speak. Professor Quintanilla is trained as a theoretical physicist, is a former professor of biophysics at Berkeley in Porto and was the chair of the Commission for Portugal's National Drug Strategy in 1998 when it all happened. Without further ado, Professor Quintanilla. Well, you know that I come from academia because I have a few slides. Let me first say how honored I am to be here today with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michel Bachelet and with our President, George Sampaio. I cannot express in words how emotional I feel about your presence here today. Distinguished guests. I was reminded. I was told to talk a little bit about the Portuguese story. And it's interesting because I also chose, I came to live in Portugal about 30 years ago, and I also chose Porto. So I wasn't born here. I chose to come here to live and to teach and to do research. And I'm immensely proud of the fact that this gathering is taking place in Porto. A few days ago I was reading a Stanford alumni publication that my husband, who spent time at Stanford, receives regularly. And the March 2019 issue talks about the drug issue. It's interesting that it should be something of last month. And I think what the Portuguese story and experience tells us and shows is that it provides evidence for the fact that ideas that did not start with our work, previous to work that we have done, actually do work. They talk about a former professor at Stanford called Avram Goldstein, who in 1979 started building the foundations of addiction science in that university. And in 1993, in a book called Addiction from Biology to Drug Policy, he wrote, and I quote, drugs were a public health problem, not a law and order issue, 1993. And that caffeine and nicotine were also addictive. Today the list of addictions is much longer. It includes alcohol, many other drugs, including the new opioids, smartphones, sex, video games, caffeine, food, gambling, social media, shopping, exercise. All of these are addictive to many people. And I think it's interesting that we can look back and see how in Portugal it was possible to have public policy conceived based on robust knowledge and evidence from different types of domains. And I want to emphasize the issue of multidisciplinary because in complex problems, you need people that come from different backgrounds to be able to dialogue with each other. And it's not easy. Each area has their own specialized words, which they try to make it as incomprehensible as possible to show that they're intelligent, so that others don't understand. And so this is not easy to do. This is a difficult thing to achieve. So I also just finished reading a wonderful book, which I recommend to everybody, by a man called William Davis. And it has a very provocative title. It's called the Happiness Industry. And he talks a little bit about this difficulty of dialogue. And he says, and I quote, the language and theories of expert elites are becoming more idiosyncratic and separate from those of the public. How they narrate human life and how we do so are pulling apart from each other, which undermines the very possibility of inclusive political deliberation. And again, I think the Portuguese experience maybe because we are a small country, maybe because we value human rights above anything else basically because we suffered from 300 years of inquisition and 50 years of a dictatorship that basically locked us in fear because we were liberated from that 45 years ago. I think we value some of the things that human rights teach us to respect. There's another book as a recommendation by David Runciman, who says basically the same thing, published in 2018, which he calls also provocatively how democracy ends. I recommend both of these books. Now, let me come to the Portuguese story because I think it illustrates how it's possible to develop a strategy. I was simply, if you want to call it some sort of a catalyst to this, I was the person that had least knowledge about drugs. And in fact, when I was invited to chair this committee, I laughed. I said, you must be joking. This was a deputy prime minister who called me and I said, I don't know anything about drugs. I've never worked in drugs. I have a few friends that, yes, but I've never smoked anything. It's strange. I grew up in Africa and then went to California. I'm not proud of it. I'm not ashamed of it. But I didn't know much about it. And he said, that's the reason we're asking you to chair because you don't come here with fixed ideas. And I agree, 20 years later, I think that's true. Let me talk to you a little bit, then, about the Portuguese story, as it's called. It became the national strategy on drugs, which we submitted to the government in 1998. And what's interesting is that the government didn't change a single comma of the strategy that we proposed. These were the people. This was a committee established during the presidency of George Sampaio, which has been mentioned many times. The prime minister was Antonio Guterres. And the deputy prime minister was Socrates, who was then prime minister for a few years. He was the one who called me and told me that it was because I didn't know much about it, that they were inviting me. And these were the people involved. These were, as you can see, a very multidisciplinary group of people from criminologists. They even have a biophysicist. That's me. And a few psychologists, a nurse, an attorney general, an adjunct. And these people worked for about four and a half months. This was an immensely sort of work-driven group that for four and a half months worked. We established different groups that were responsible for different chapters in the strategy. And these were the ones that you can see here in prevention. We had Daniel Sampaio in treatment, risk reduction, resocialization, drone go long, who's here with you today and who's been active in this area for a very long time. He probably knows more about it than I don't want to exaggerate. But like many of you, he's been associated with this for a very long time, and nun Miguel. And the legal framework in international perspective with Lorenz Martins, research and training by Kandagren, organization impact with Julie Machard-Vazh and Joakim Triggs. And I've put at the bottom in red something which did change the way we worked. We decided to have public hearings about the strategy all over Portugal. We organized, we rented cinemas, cinemas that took up to 800 to 1,000 people to have public discussions about what we were doing. And that was probably the one event. There were several, we did half a dozen or more that touched me the most. Because there you had real people who would come up to us at the end of the meeting. You know, the cinemas were completely full of people. There were people sitting, the security people were very worried because they were not allowed, but they were sitting on the floor around the place where we were talking. People came up to us in tears at the end of these discussions which went on for about four hours, thanking us for doing the work that we were doing. And this was humbling because we had real people, ladies, you know, small 85-year-old ladies who would come and would grab us and would thank us for the kind of work that we were doing at that time. It was very touching, it was very motivating and it helped us develop the work further. The timetable seemed almost impossible. We were given the task in September in, I think it was February of 1998. The strategy was delivered in the summer of 1998. It was approved and adopted by the government in 1999 and I suspect a few weeks later signed by President George Sampaio because it doesn't become law until the president signs it and it emphasized essentially three main aspects. Integrated policies. You can't try to solve this by just looking at one aspect. You have to have an integrated policy across both education, training, harm reduction, judicial policies, international policies, the way you do, you train future researchers in the area. It was prevention was a very important aspect. Shift from criminals to patients and somebody recently said, well now maybe we should use it from criminals to patients and now to human beings, which is perhaps how we should look at this whole issue and trust accumulated and robust knowledge between the people that we're working here. 20 years later, the results are impressive. I don't think we solved everything at the time. The whole issue of procurement of the drugs was not dealt with at that time. It still needs to be addressed and although not perfect, the strategy veined enormous momentums. The government decision to adopt the strategy in early 1999 was bold and very controversial. We were told that international, many governments in the world and international organizations would take us to international courts when we did this. We were threatened that this would never pass in the legal system internationally and it was possible because it was based on the most reliable existing knowledge, which you know evolves very rapidly these days, but what we had at the time had the most knowledgeable people working, a capacity to listen to many stakeholders. I think this is probably the most important aspect of the strategy, the fact that we were able to listen and to understand what we were listening to and to be able to then trust the people that could then develop a strategy for the future. And as you all know, many of those who've had boyfriends and girlfriends and have been married, trust takes a long time to build and can be destroyed and can be in a very short moment. It's extremely fragile. In Portugal the strategy is being sort of oscillating, it's been going, you know, there's some moments that are more positive than others. I think looking back 20 years, I think we've done, we've done, we've done well. It was very risky at the time. I don't think it's risky anymore. And I would like to end with three ideas. And these are from people that I respect a great deal, a philosopher, a writer. And the first one simply says, take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself. And what he's referring to there is take care of the freedom to ask questions, take freedom, respect the freedom to give different answers, answers that are not old, answers that are new, that are innovative and truth will take care of itself. And I like the fact that truth is written with a little t, not with a big t, because it evolves. And the second one is very clearly demonstrated by our strategy, which has the voyage of discovery has less to do with finding new landscapes than looking with fresh eyes. And we have problems sometimes looking with fresh eyes. We, after a certain time, our eyes are no longer so fresh. And if we have other people asking questions that we've never heard before, maybe our eyes become fresh. And my final message is supposed to be an African proverb. I'm very proud. I was born and raised in Mozambique and then in South Africa and then I spent 20 years in Berkeley. This is a wonderful quote. If you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. And I think the group showed that that was the way to move. And thank you for having me here to tell you the story.