 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 were 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 multidisciplinarity 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 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 least that had least knowledge about drugs and in fact when I was invited to chair this committee I laughed I said you know 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 don't I've you know I've never smoked anything it's strange you know 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 the the Portuguese story as it's called it was it became the national strategy on drugs which we submitted to the government in in 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 Jean-Saint-Pierre 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 they they 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 strata for different chapters in the strategy and these were the ones that you can see here in prevention we had the Niaf and Payu in treatment risk reduction and re-socialization Drongo Lung 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 wouldn't 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 in the legal framework international perspective with Lawrence Martins research and training by Kandahar and organization impact 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 a thousand people to have public discussions about what we were doing and that was probably the one 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 us 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 the the place where we were talking and 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 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 um in uh septem in i think it was i think 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 Sampai 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 the this whole issue and trust accumulated and robust knowledge between the people that were 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 gained enormous momentum the government decision to adopt the strategy in early 99 was bold and very controversial we were told that international government many governments in the world and international organizations would take us to international courts when we did this we were we were threatened that this would never pass in the in in in 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 that 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 has been sort of oscillating has 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 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 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 moza and beak and then in south africa and then i spent 20 years in berkeley this is a wonderful quote if you want to go fast go alone if you want to 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 amazing amazing eh so now maybe realize why we did invite professor elshand quintanilla to come here and join you know his ideas and thoughts with us and his work