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From Our Own Correspondent: How Portugal deals with drugs

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A patient receives syringes in Lisbon, Portugal

07/10/2023 GMT

How Portugal deals with drugs

BBC World Service - From Our Own Correspondent, How Portugal deals with drugs

Can a new approach focusing on medical needs really reduce the harm drugs do?

Has a new approach really reduced the harm drugs cause? Plus: Turkey reacts to a new attack by the PKK; the women demining South Sudan; trading over the China-Kyrgyzstan border

Pascale Harter introduces insights  and analysis from BBC correspondents, journalists and writers around the world.

Portugal decriminalized the public and private use, acquisition, and possession of all drugs in 2000 - while keeping heavier legal penalties for dealers and drug traffickers. Now many other governments around the world are also considering how best to limit the damage the drug trade can inflict on their countries. James Cook visited a clinic in Porto, northern Portugal, where addicts can legally consume drugs under medical supervision, to weigh up how the alternative approach has been working. 

In the aftermath of a new suicide bombing in Ankara, which was claimed by the Kurdish rebel movement the PKK, Emily Wither reports from Turkey on how the public reacted. In cities across the country, there are many people with traumatic memories of terrorist attacks mounted by the PKK and Islamic State during the 2010s. More recently, the Turkish state has turned to using drones to attack its enemies at home and abroad - and says "the future is in the skies".

Hundreds of thousands of refugees are flooding INTO South Sudan - a nation whose people have had to survive decades of war, first for their independence, and then within its own borders after a series of internal conflicts. That has left its fields, farms and roads peppered with unexploded and possibly lethal landmines and bombs. Sira Thierij went out with a group of women working to make their homeland safer, one controlled explosion at a time. 

And ten years after the announcement of China's ambitious "Belt and Road" initiative - which first aimed to integrate China more closely with its neigbours in central Asia, and has since spread out to include infrastructure projects across the world and even into space - Jacob Mardell takes a journey to a borderland which still looks pretty wild. The Torugart pass in Kyrgyzstan offers breathtaking landscapes, with high mountains, vast lakes and only the occasional yurt as a sign of human life. But it might soon be much more developed, if a planned railway is built...


(Image: A patient addicted to heroin receives clean syringes in Lisbon, Portugal. Credit: Horacio Villalobos - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

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