The Portuguese police experience with drug decriminalisation.

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Published before final editing as: Policing Soc. 2026 May 21:10.1080/10439463.2026.2674973. doi: 10.1080/10439463.2026.2674973 The Portuguese police experience with drug decriminalisation Miguel Moniz a , Beatriz Ribeiro b , Erin Thompson c , Brandon Del Pozo c, d Author information Copyright and License information a Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal b NOVA University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal c Rhode Island Hospital, Brown University Health, Providence, RI, USA d The Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Author contributions CRediT: Miguel Moniz: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing; Beatriz Ribeiro: Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – review & editing; Erin Thompson: Investigation, Project administration, Writing – review & editing; Brandon Del Pozo: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. ✉ CONTACT Brandon Del Pozo, bdelpozo@brownhealth.org , Rhode Island Hospital, Brown University Health, 111 Plain St, Providence, RI 02903, USA Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gpas20 PMC Copyright notice PMCID: PMC13229567  NIHMSID: NIHMS2180198  PMID: 42238309 The publisher's version of this article is available at Policing Soc Abstract As attempts to decriminalise the personal possession of drugs have foundered in North America over concerns about its negative effects on crime and public order, Portugal’s 2001 decriminalisation strategy remains widely regarded as the most successful reform to date. Despite this success, there is little research about the experience of Portugal’s national police as central actors in the initiative. Addressing this gap, this study investigated Portuguese Police and Public Safety experiences with decriminalisation through qualitative interviews with 19 participants, principally consisting of veteran police executives and national police and health policymakers who had direct roles in implementing and discharging the nation’s drug policy, as well as street-level patrol and narcotics officers. Participants explained police practices within Portugal’s drug decriminalisation policy that made it compatible with maintaining public safety and order, contributing to the feasibility and acceptability, among police, of a drug control strategy associated with nationwide reductions in fatal overdose and infectious disease. They stressed: the deliberate manner in which decriminalisation was planned and implemented; how the shift prioritised public health, relying on police as conduits to health-related interventions that also reduced the criminal activity motivated by substance use disorder; the police role referring otherwise difficult-to-reach people with addiction treatment and social services; the provisions through which police could effectively address disruptive public drug use and pursue narcotics trafficking. Decriminalisation shifted the police role in Portuguese society, resulting in the gradual evolution of police culture towards its acceptance. Policymakers can use Portugal as a case study of successful innovation. Keywords: Decriminalisation, policing, Portugal, drugs Introduction In North America, a decades-long approach to problematic substance use, often explicitly styled after waging war ( Farber 2021 ), has resulted in the worst fatal overdose crisis in recorded history ( NCHS 2024 ), demonstrating that the manner in which a population is policed is a powerful determinant of its health ( Rock et al. 2026 ). A growing desire to moderate this approach has generated an interest in a wide range of measures, among them decriminalising the personal possession of illicit drugs ( Stevens et al. 2022 ). In contrast to legalisation, decriminalisation describes a category of initiatives that remove criminal penalties from an act, but leave the government with other legal powers to regulate the prohibited behaviour in question ( Husak 2002 ). Broadly, such a move seeks to protect the health of people who use drugs (PWUD) by limiting the risks and disruptions of their involvement in the justice system, which is closely associated with elevated rates of overdose ( Binswanger et al. 2011 , Binswanger et al. 2013 , Brinkley-Rubinstein et al. 2018 ). Based on this belief, some jurisdictions have engaged in the de facto decriminalisation of drug possession prior to the often prolonged and controversial effort to formally do so under the law ( Greer et al. 2022a , Sherman et al. 2023 ). The most notable effort at de jure decriminalisation in the US occurred in Oregon in January, 2021, with the passage of a state ballot measure that was substantially reversed by the fall of 2024, less than three years later ( Baker 2025 ). As a result, Oregon’s initiative was widely characterised in the popular press as a failure ( Kim 2024 ). Apart from a brief period of judge-ordered decriminalisation in Washington State in 2021 that was subsequently reversed by the state’s legislature ( Romine et al. 2023 ) and a 2023 decriminalisation initiative in the Canadian province of British Columbia that was substantially reversed in 2024 ( Kelly 2025 ), recent efforts have consisted of piecemeal measures targeting cannabis ( Wheeldon and Heidt 2025 ), other specific drugs ( Paris 2021 , Siegel et al. 2023 ), or reducing the magnitude of criminal penalties rather than decriminalisation ( Kneen 2021 ). No other de jure attempts to comprehensively decriminalise personal drug possession have been successfully undertaken in North America since Oregon’s trial ended in 2024. In demonstrating the potential of comprehensive decriminalisation, the most frequent point of reference is Portugal, which decriminalised the possession of all drugs for personal use in 2001 ( Assembly of the Republic of Portugal 2001 , Greer et al. 2022b , Russoniello et al. 2023 ). The policy descheduled all drugs, eliminating statutory disparities based on the type of illicit substance and defining criminality based on a determination of intent for personal consumption or trafficking. Rather than face criminal charges, people who possess drugs intended for personal consumption are referred to Addiction Dissuasion Commissions (CDTs), an entity described below and in significant detail in other research ( Hughes and Stevens 2010 ) that assess their social, economic and behavioural health needs ( Cutrona and García 2025 ), provide information, services and incentives that can dissuade them from continued substance use, and offer access to voluntary addiction treatment modalities with proven records of effectiveness, such as methadone ( Wakeman et al. 2020 , Santo et al. 2021 ). Those assessed as recreational users or who are not at risk of problematic use have no further interaction with the CDTs, however, are provided health and well-being information. Although failure to appear at the commission, or noncompliance with check-ins and other requirements can lead to sanction (including fines), the process never carries a criminal charge for drug possession. The approach successfully addressed Portugal’s health concerns: the nation soon saw substantial, sustained decreases in its rate of HIV infection, which had been the highest in the European Union ( Greenwald 2009 ), as well as notable decreases in fatal drug overdose ( Hughes and Stevens 2010 ). The most recent numbers for fatal drug overdose per year in Portugal increased slightly from 69 deaths in 2022 to 80 in 2023 among 10.7 million residents ( ICAD 2025a ), reflecting an overdose death rate that would be considered a monumental victory were it achieved in the United States, for example ( Mann 2024 ), where overdose deaths recently peaked at over 110,000 a year ( NCHS 2024 ). Compared to much more restrained and marginal decriminalisation efforts in Mexico ( Arredondo et al. 2018 ), Italy ( Di Luca et al. 2020 ) and Spain ( Gamella and Rodrigo 2004 ), which have not been widely invoked by drug policy reformers as models to emulate, Portugal’s initiative remains the decriminalisation movement’s lodestar. A thorough and rigorous understanding of Portugal’s approach related to the central role of police in the country as a means of triage for public health services would, therefore, provide an illuminating point of comparison to the aborted efforts in Oregon and elsewhere and offer valuable insights for international drug policy going forward. The most notable objections to Oregon’s decriminalisation were similar to those Moniz and del Pozo have noted in conversation with police officers across North America: the police’s inability to remove suspects from public spaces by enforcing drug possession laws and the acute public disorder evident in Oregon’s population centres ( Henderson et al. 2023 , del Pozo 2024 ). Critics also noted that the reform tasked police with triggering a civil process that was widely disregarded ( Gaitán 2023 , Crombie 2024 ). It consisted of either paying a $100 fine or completing a telephone-based health screening within 45 days; 81% of the people whom police cited for drug possession were convicted of civil infractions for doing neither ( Comagine Health 2024 ). The screening, which was completed and returned to court by fewer than 1% of those cited ( Wilson 2023 ), provided conduits to voluntary treatment and services that were among the most poorly resourced of those in any US state at the time of decriminalisation ( SAMHSA 2017 ) and were frustratingly slow to expand as intended by the state’s decriminalisation strategy ( Green 2022 , Clemans-Cope 2023 ). The remainder of those with civil convictions never paid their fines. Oregon’s police consistently voiced these problems as reasons why the state’s version of decriminalisation was unacceptable to them since, as one police official in a 2023 qualitative study asserted, decriminalisation in Oregon was ‘all carrots and no stick’ ( Smiley-Mcdonald et al. 2023 ). While Portugal’s pioneering drug policy regime has been the topic of significant scholarly analysis and media coverage, there nonetheless exist considerable gaps in our understanding of its implementation and practice. Perhaps the greatest gap is an understanding of how the nation’s police have experienced decriminalisation and reconciled it with their responsibility to deliver public safety and quality of life in public spaces. To date, however, there has been no published research on the topic that has engaged the Portuguese police involved in the relevant decision making and operational roles. For example, the most widely-cited mixed methods study of Portugal’s decriminalisation was unable to recruit police participants, which limited its related insights to quantitative criminal justice outcomes ( Hughes and Stevens 2010 ). Given the lacklustre results of decriminalisation in Oregon, the legislative reversal of decriminalisation in Washington State, and the considerable narrowing of decriminalisation’s scope in the Canadian province of British Columbia to cover only personal quantities of specified substances possessed in private (as opposed to public) places – all for similar policing-related reasons ( Austen 2024 ) – filling this gap would provide the means for a valuable comparative policy analysis and offer prospective guidance for evolving drug policies. Indeed, a deeper understanding of the police practices and concerns relevant to drug policy reform in Portugal may contribute to improved approaches to problematic substance use disorder generally, a condition where policing and health are inextricably entwined ( del Pozo et al. 2021 , Bacon and Spicer 2023 ). The aim of this study was, therefore, to investigate how Portuguese police experienced over two decades of decriminalised drug possession, and how these experiences influenced its feasibility, acceptability and effectiveness. Although police have discretion that can determine what constitutes public disruption related to drug use, police are not responsible for determining who is (or may be at risk of becoming) a problematic user of drugs. This is taken up after police cite users to appear at CDTs by trained healthcare professionals in consultation with users themselves, who have the final word on determining their own course of action and utilisation of treatment services. The findings we present centre on the public expectation that police address public order and quality of life in shared spaces ( Smiley-Mcdonald et al. 2023 ), issues associated with substance use, reconciling this role with drug decriminalisation while presenting Portugal’s approach to leveraging police contacts with PWUD as a central feature of the nation’s drug strategy, an integration that public health officials responsible for carrying out the nation’s drug policy cast in a positive, if paternalistic, light. The study, therefore, has implications that are specific to future drug policy innovations and reforms in police settings, as well as the planning and execution of significant organisational changes in policing more generally. This study then examines the nuance in the police’s drug policy role, including how they monitor and keep order over community quality of life issues under Portugal’s decriminalisation regime. Summary of police role Under the policy changes implemented in 2001, an individual apprehended by police with drugs will be detained, searched and potentially removed from the scene; the illicit substances recovered will be weighed to determine intent to use or to sell. If the weight is over the threshold for a particular substance, the police will initiate criminal proceedings. If it is under, those apprehended with drugs are given an administrative summons to appear at one of the district CDTs. Appearance is mandatory, and the police have a role in administering sanctions for non-appearance and ensuring compliance. While weighing recovered drugs is part of the police role in gathering evidence for prosecutors, in practice, the ultimate determination of personal possession versus an intent to distribute can be ambiguous. A 2023 (55/2023) amendment, for example, addressed this ambiguity by widening the range of factors that could indicate drug trafficking beyond a simple threshold weight. Prosecutors are ultimately responsible for determining charges and seeking convictions on criminal cases, with the police role focused on evidence gathering. Such changes to Portuguese drug policy law and implementation have occurred as a response to multiple factors including budgetary and political priorities, public perception and changes to the composition and potency of the nation’s illicit drug supply. According to both the PSP national drug coordinator and the director of Portugal’s drug policy agency in the Health Ministry, since its inception, Portugal’s decriminalisation regime has included police input and representation in the oversight process, and periodic adjustments to the policy have reflected collaborative agreements among stakeholders. Methods Design Our approach consisted of qualitative interviews with key Portuguese police officers who could provide firsthand knowledge about the practices and experiences of officers across ranks and relevant assignments in Portugal’s national police force and with adjacent actors in Portugal’s drug control policy apparatus in roles with significant interaction with police officers who could both cross-check these findings and provide additional context for them. Setting There are multiple national police authorities in Portugal, each with specific but often overlapping roles in the national drug strategy. The nation’s largest municipal urban police force is the Polícia de Segurança Pública or PSP, which is the primary setting for this study. Overall, Portugal’s national police forces (including the PSP and the GNR, the Guarda Nacional Republicana) handle 62% of encounters and referrals of PWUD to the country’s health care system ( ICAD 2025b ), giving police a central role in the implementation of Portugal’s public health drug strategy. The GNR is a more militarised police force falling under the dual command of the Portuguese Foreign Ministry and Interior Ministry. Although the number of agents in each agency is comparable (GNR 22,000; PSP 20,000), the GNR’s jurisdiction covers the majority of the country’s geography, including the policing of roads, highways and rural areas, and it also contributes to Portugal’s coast guard. Given the broader amount of territory policed by the GNR, it makes a greater number of referrals to the CDTs than does the PSP; however, given the agency’s mission, the PSP makes a greater number of interventions in urban settings. As a result, the PSP better met the selection criteria for this study. As the police force tasked with delivering services in Portugal’s urban centres, it engages a more diverse cross-section of PWUD potentially involved in problematic substance use in dense public settings; for example, more than half of the PSP’s 20,000 agents work in the city of Lisbon. The high-density municipal areas served by the PSP mean that interactions with PWUD occur in more concentrated settings and have a greater impact on the communities in which public drug consumption and trafficking take place. Although the PSP generates fewer raw numbers of referrals to the health care system than the GNR, given the nature of policing an urban municipality, more PSP officers are involved on a daily basis with drugs and PWUD, with drug enforcement operations and make the kind of discretionary decisions related to high profile public quality of life concerns. Investigating the impact of Portugal’s policy relative to quality-of-life issues was a central goal of this study, so given these factors, the PSP was selected as the most appropriate setting. Other important areas of PSP responsibility in Portugal’s drug policy include operations to combat drug trafficking and coordinating activities with other national law enforcement agencies as required by the scope of a given investigation. The PSP is organised with a National Director appointed by the Ministry of Home Affairs, subordinate to the Prime Minister. The National Director has delegatory authority over a command structure of national mission command coordinators whose offices all report directly to him, along with 19 district command centres throughout Portugal whose commanders have responsibility over particular geographic territories. These command centres vary in resources and personnel, with the largest responsible for policing major cities such as Lisbon and Porto and others decreasing in size in rough proportion to the municipal populations served. The PSP’s work is typical of a municipal police force: foot and vehicular patrols, deploying disorder squads and undertaking community policing – including crime and drug prevention outreach in schools. It is important to point out that the centralised nature of the PSP facilitates the implementation of nationwide PSP policies. The linear and far-reaching national command structure in Portugal restricts executives with hopes of career advancement from simply ignoring or rejecting agencywide policies dictated by national leaders. This differs from police departments in the United States, for example, in which the police executives at the helm of approximately 18,000 different agencies serve at the pleasure of the governing officials of their municipalities, yielding a pronounced heterogeneity among their strategies and policies. Although this study focused on the PSP, supplemental interviews were conducted with executives and agents in the Judicial Police (PJ) and National Republican Guard (GNR), the other two primary national police agencies in Portugal. While drug enforcement may be broadly under the remit of these and other additional agencies, including Immigration and Borders Service (SEF) and the Maritime Authority System (SAM), the role of the PSP as the nation’s all-purpose police force with the mission of serving urban municipalities makes it the key police participant in Portugal’s approach to substance use among individual PWUD ( Assembly of the Republic of Portugal 2007 ), where the personal possession of contraband narcotics is a civil matter rather than a crime ( Assembly of the Republic of Portugal 2001 ). Responsible conduct of research The study required approval from the department of the national office of the PSP responsible for its educational, training and research activities, then the identification and recruitment of appropriate individuals in its command structure. The application required laying out the study design, explaining how human subjects would be protected and documenting measures taken to ensure confidentiality and data security. Since Portugal does not have a formal social science IRB process among its academic research institutions, the research team conferred with the PSP’s research unit and university professors serving in research ethics advisory roles in Portuguese universities to ensure the study’s design was in keeping with the nation’s cultural and professional expectations ( Council, N.R. et al. 2007 ), including compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union ( Hoofnagle et al. 2019 ). With the PSP’s approval of the study in hand, Brown University Health’s IRB subsequently determined the study posed no more than a minimal risk, and designated it exempt as per the Common Rule. The United States’ National Institute on Drug Abuse approved the research as a federally supported project with a foreign component. Study population: composition and recruitment Our study principally sought police participants with long-term experience (police who had served in the PSP either before or since the beginning of implementation). The police study population identified for recruitment was primarily composed of three command-level national executives (responsible for implementing and coordinating the PSP’s national strategies), four senior command officers of regional police districts (two of whom led criminal investigations), two undercover street-level narcotics investigators and four uniformed patrol officers. The police officers at lower ranks were included to provide context for the perspectives offered by these executives, and to ensure a window into current policing practices and concerns at the street level. All seven of the PSP executives and agents in the study had prior street-level experience implementing and executing Portugal’s drug decriminalisation policy. Of these, six executives and two agents had been on the force since the policy was implemented in 2001, while an additional executive began police training in 2005, shortly after the implementation. Initial recruitment through email was supplemented by snowball sampling via subsequent networking among the PSP and the wider community of people tasked with responding to problematic substance use in Portugal. A key goal of the study that was realised was to identify and recruit the highest-level executive decision makers at the national and district level charged with interpreting and implementing the PSP’s role in Portugal’s drug strategy. After a PSP IRB process that included prior submission of study design, questionnaires, and project and interviewee recruitment goals, the PSP’s national coordinator of drug policy assisted the investigators in reaching the study’s target group of participants. Given the high profile of many respondents and the ease with which they could be re-identified, as well as the inclusion of undercover and street patrol police, more specific defining characteristics are not provided outside of these general classifications in order to protect participant identities and to ensure candid responses. Data collection The study’s interview guide reflected a priori hypotheses about policing and decriminalisation identified by several means: a police advisory board of eight active and retired police executives from US jurisdictions who had experience formulating and directing police responses to drug possession and problematic substance use; interviews with state-level elected officials and federal and state policymakers about their concerns and expectations for decriminalisation strategies; law enforcement officials, including police, sheriffs’ departments and prosecutors’ offices; state-level healthcare officials; exploratory interviews with Portuguese officials; and themes that arose from a qualitative study of police perceptions of the outcomes of decriminalisation in Oregon ( Smiley-Mcdonald et al. 2023 ). To further shape the interview guide and inform investigators’ understanding of key issues, interviews were conducted with the Director of the Polícia Judiciária’s National Unit to Combat Drug Trafficking and a GNR agent (in part to understand how the GNR’s role compared to the PSP, verifying assumptions and selecting the PSP as the appropriate research setting). Background research was also conducted through informal interviews and previous collaborations between Moniz and del Pozo with the Director of National Drug Policy and Interventions on Addictive Behaviours for Portugal (ICAD). The research team’s interviews in Portugal began in the summer of 2024, principally in Portuguese with in-situ translation for the non-Portuguese speaking members of the investigative unit as necessary, though some were conducted in English if the participant was fluent. Most interviews ranged from approximately 45 to 90 min, while some went considerably longer. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed using Notta (2024) , read for accuracy and corrected, then translated prior to analysis. Analysis Our analysis blended inductive and deductive methods ( Azungah 2018 , Fife and Gossner 2024 ). To identify unique insights from the Portuguese experience that could not be based on a priori hypotheses arising from drug reforms elsewhere, investigators engaged in an inductive analysis ( Thomas 2003 , Kyngäs 2019 ). Centered on an experiential qualitative framework ( Braun and Clarke 2006 ), it assumed the accounts offered by participants accurately reflected their views and lived experiences, especially since we sought observations about a decades-long programme rather than detailed accounts of particular incidents. These analyses were complemented by a deductive approach recently exemplified by Robinson and Bailey-Rodriguez (2026) , which interrogated the a priori theories arising from settings such as Oregon and British Columbia and the interviews with U.S. police executives and Portuguese officials as described above. Two of the interviewers were residents of Portugal who spoke Portuguese; all spoke English, as did most of the more senior Portuguese police executives. To accommodate team members with limited Portuguese proficiency, the researchers who participated in each interview would confer in situ and upon its conclusion to affirm a mutual understanding of its content and emerging categories, with such conferrals informed by reflexive journaling ( Mcgrath 2021 , Olmos-Vega et al. 2023 ) throughout the study. Engaging in reflexive thematic analysis ( Shaw 2010 ), the study’s lead author was the principal manual coder, complemented by the senior author, who was also present for all key informant interviews and subsequently utilised translated transcripts to identify and compare themes. The two Portuguese-speaking team members then re-read interview transcripts to confirm inductive categories and identify any additional ones by identifying illustrative text segments. The transcripts were also used to deductively examine the a priori hypotheses introduced by the team during interviews by the same comparative process, starting with the first and senior authors and incorporating checks by the others. This iterative technique revealed both common and divergent sentiments and patterns in the data, facilitating the study team’s agreement on identified themes about the Portuguese police experience with drug decriminalisation. Members of the study team met in the immediate aftermath of data collection to refine categories and develop themes. The team then met virtually several weeks later to arrive at a consensus about the categories and exemplars arising from their analyses, with the first and senior authors jointly consulting transcripts in Portuguese and English to resolve the few inconsistencies that emerged. Results Composition of the sample of key informants Our sample of 19 participants consisted of individuals positioned to speak with knowledge and authority about the questions under study. It was composed of the Portuguese Ministry of Health’s Director of National drug policy and intervention on addictive behaviour (responsible for the design, implementation and administration of Portugal’s decriminalisation initiative from its inception onward) and a senior officer for the Ministry’s international relations unit, as well as the following PSP staff: the national superintendent of the Criminal Investigation Division; the national police drug policy coordinator; the national liaison to Europol (a legal scholar and current PSP Lisbon District Commander); the Commander of Criminal Investigation for the Lisbon District; the Commander of Criminal Investigation for the Setubal District; the Chief of Operations for the Leiria District; two criminal investigators assigned to the Lisbon District; four patrol officers assigned to the Lisbon District. Interviews were also conducted with the District Commander of Faro as part of a panel chaired/co-organised by Moniz, in which the key informant also presented a presentation on the role of the PSP in Portugal’s drug strategy. Executive officers also had considerable experience in other ranks, roles, units and districts, including as beat officers and investigators policing PWUD at the street level and in geographic regions beyond those to which they were assigned at the time of the study. These past assignments allowed the study to draw from police experiences beyond the concentration in Lisbon suggested by many participants’ present postings. To cross-check results beyond the PSP, and for additional context on Portuguese policing and drug enforcement practices as experienced from outside the cultural sphere of the police themselves, formal interviews were conducted with the six non-police officials who planned, administered, or regularly interfaced with Portugal’s drug policy and the PSP officers involved in executing it. These were the Director of ICAD, the director and a staff member of Lisbon’s CDT, a Ministry of Health drug policy information officer and an administrator and staff member at Lisbon’s overdose prevention centre/safe use site, where PWUD can inject and consume substances under observation and receive medical attention in the event of overdose. Interviews were wide-ranging but focussed on interactions with police in the spheres of responsibility of the interviewees. Background interviews were also conducted with the director of a mobile methadone, drug testing and wellness programme, and a student researcher embedded at the overdose prevention/safe use site. The sample of key informants was of a size ( N = 19 ) found by a systematic review of satisfactory saturation levels in qualitative studies to be more than sufficient for thematic saturation in the case here ( Hennink and Kaiser 2022 ), especially considering the sampling of a substantial number of police executives and national officials, including the ranking police officers coordinating drug policy and criminal investigations at the national level. In that vein, the thematic saturation described here pertains to the group of participants capable of speaking on a given theme. For example, themes arising from historical accounts reached saturation among the number of highly experienced police executives we interviewed, and contemporary police concerns did so among the entire group of officers; more general observations about Portugal’s decriminalisation strategy reached saturation among the entire sample, to include non-police participants. Findings Our analysis yielded two types of data, both of which are of value in understanding the Portuguese police experience with decriminalisation: a narrative account of the design, implementation, execution and ongoing evaluation of decriminalisation in Portugal as it concerned the PSP, and corresponding categories that the participants felt were especially salient aspects of the policy based on their perspective as police officers and/or government officials. Since neither type of data has been systematically collected from police and published, we present both in our findings. Organised around the emergent categories, our findings therefore also present a narrative account of decriminalisation where relevant. Six categories of analysis were identified, each describing how decriminalisation has been experienced by police: (1) the norms and rationale for decriminalisation, (2) key aspects of successful implementation, (3) its effect on drug trafficking investigations, (4) its effect on policing public order, (5) police relationships with PWUD and (6) evolving attitudes towards decriminalisation. Quotations from the qualitative interviews are included in this paper based on representative applicability emerging from coded category analysis. Because the study sample consists of officials acting in unique roles that make them especially susceptible to reidentification, in most cases, we have omitted participant numeric designation to better protect their anonymity with regard to specific quotes. In others, such as statements made by national figures with an extensive history of on-the-record interviews, we have attributed statements to them with permissions secured during the consent process. Norms and rationale During our interviews, three features salient to policing distinguished the character of drug decriminalisation in Portugal. One was a commitment made by the Prime Minister when he charged the committee responsible with drug reform recommendations, specifying that any drug reform recommendations should honour the terms of the United Nations’ Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, of which Portugal was a signatory. Doing so precluded the legalisation of drug possession as a possible recommendation because it could not be reconciled with the convention’s broad schedule of illicit drugs and the requirement to vigorously enforce laws against trafficking them ( Bewley-Taylor 2003 ). The ministerial commission responsible for altering the nation’s laws and policies interpreted the Single Convention as permitting the decriminalised possession of drugs in quantities consistent with personal use, while still regarding these drugs to be a form of contraband subject to confiscation or, in larger quantities, to criminal trafficking enforcement. The second feature adopted by the agencies implementing and managing the drugs policy is an explicitly paternalistic approach to both drug use and problematic substance use disorder. Study participants in the highest ranks and positions related that the government took the stance that recreational drug consumption was an undesirable and often harmful practice and the government’s goal was to dissuade use without resorting to criminalisation to do so. To achieve this goal, Portugal’s decriminalisation regime established Drug Dissuasion Commissions (CDTs) in all of the nation’s districts and large municipalities. These government-funded organisations receive and process those cited by police for drug possession, evaluate their risk of problematic drug use, and provide gateways to health care, support services, professional programmes and plans for reintegration into the community during the process of recovery. The CDTs have the authority to level civil sanctions for non-appearance or repeat encounters, typically consisting of mandatory check-ins, community service and in some cases monetary fines. In rarer instances of repeated non-compliance or danger to an individual or others, the CDTs can also level stricter and more substantial sanctions, including the revocation of trade and professional licences when substance use could create attendant safety hazards, civil asset forfeiture, the loss of the ability to possess a firearm, banning individuals from public places where they have engaged in substance use and prohibiting PWUD from associating with specific people known to facilitate their disruptive behaviour. The third feature of Portugal’s decriminalisation regime casts police as the central public triage through which PWUD enter the nation’s treatment, health care and social service infrastructure. Rather than characterising decriminalisation as a means to reduce or limit contact between police and PWUD, our study participants characterised police contacts as one of the critical government conduits for access to services that can improve their health. In this way, decriminalisation of drug possession was conceived of as a practical means to leverage the role of police for improved health outcomes. In explaining the nation’s approach to drug policy, Portugal’s senior official charged with implementing the policy tied these three ideas together: With this tool, with the police authorities sending people to the CDTs, we have the opportunity to interact with people we otherwise do not reach … The final goal is always to contribute to a longer and healthier life, and in most cases that means stopping using substances … With a little bit of muscle, I have the opportunity to interact with [drug users]. The muscle comes from the police authorities. Implementation Respondents emphasised that the decision to decriminalise drugs was made by the national government in a process that did not include the PSP in an official capacity, but steps were taken to allow police to successfully implement the necessary changes to practice, and since operationalisation, PSP coordinators continue to work with Health Ministry officials on policy concerns. Further, the policy was implemented among the institutions concerned and introduced to the public in a way that intended to keep both the police and the public on board. As such, training was seen as a key to successful implementation. A manual that outlined the approach described the actions and procedures expected of the police and was part of a nationwide PSP training programme that was instituted and completed in the year prior to the enactment of decriminalisation. This period between the final decision to decriminalise and its date of implementation, which allowed for the design and execution of a detailed police training curriculum, signalled the government’s commitment to ensuring police and other actors were ready for the policy changes. As a national executive present for the implementation of decriminalisation observed, Among police, training is fundamental. Mixing the young generation and the old generation in joint teams. I was a young police officer at that time, and I was working with the older generation of police officers and we were discussing training and sensitization within the police force, it was fundamental. One of the study’s participants, a senior official with national criminal investigative responsibilities, remarked that decriminalisation means nothing without a framework that effectively leverages the opportunities it creates. Critically, Portugal’s nationalised healthcare system was able to offer methadone treatment to all people with an opioid use disorder at no cost, without a wait. The nation was able to do so by making methadone-based treatment for opioid use disorder the formal standard of care for its universal, government-funded healthcare system and building out the infrastructure for it across the country as a standard of care. In an assertion that aligns with empirical research in several settings ( Ball and Ross 1991 , Hser et al. 2016 , Evans et al. 2019 , Evans et al. 2022 ), a PSP district commander of criminal investigation characterised the provision of methadone as an intervention to reduce crime by treating the underlying physiological condition that motivated it: When you introduce someone into a methadone program, his needs are satisfied, so they don’t need to do prostitution, or commit crimes. I think that in Lisbon we have evidence for that theory. Participants who either helped execute the initiative or who were actively serving at the time of the programme’s commencement, including Lisbon’s CDT director, remarked that the network of treatment, services and other resources was fully in place when the initiative began, It was a very pragmatic technical approach, getting experts together that knew the terrain, knew the drug issues, knew the healthcare system, knew the policing system, and asked them, okay, what can we do to solve this? All PSP executives conveyed that Portugal’s highly coordinated and highly centralised approach to implementation (which we note benefited from the country’s comparatively modest size, centralised national government and universal healthcare system) respected the police as the origin point of a public health intervention that referred people to the CDT, thereby serving as a conduit to treatment and services for populations that might otherwise be hard for the government to reach, an observation exemplified above by the national drug policy coordinator’s characterisation of the PSP as a ‘little bit of muscle’. Drug trafficking investigations PSP officials at all ranks emphasised that the sale of illicit drugs always remained a felony crime, even if a dealer was selling to facilitate personal use. For example, a district commander of criminal investigation pointed out that, … direct sales are a priority for us, to put an end to direct sales stalls, to systematically, carry out raids, seizures, identifying – with strategic analysis – what we have, where we have it, where it’s being sold and taking action. This emphasis on eliminating trafficking has continued despite the decriminalisation regime, which police officers and officials in other nations have expressed would limit their ability to conduct investigations. When asked if decriminalisation hindered police investigations of criminal trafficking, the PSP national police drug policy coordinator responded, I don’t think so … The PSP is concerned with working on supply, not so much on the issue of consumption … we’re concerned with prevention and repression. On the repression side, we’re concerned with investigating crime and the traffickers … by limiting supply, we can also limit demand … We have several teams, several specific drug investigation brigades, and we have a lot of drug investigations, we seize a lot of drugs. And that’s our focus. Suspicion of trafficking is determined by a baseline possession of more than a typical 10-day supply of drugs intended for personal use, which is defined by the amount of an illicit drug possessed (weight, units and, in some cases, type of packaging, using threshold guidelines for a particular substance). Under the 2023 amendment noted in the introduction, however, suspicion of trafficking could also be established if one had less than a 10-day supply when coupled with more subjective behavioural evidence of dealing ( Pinto et al. 2023 ). Notably, PWUD can be expected to play a role in trafficking investigations, even if they are not facing criminal charges themselves. Participants noted that people who have material knowledge of drug trafficking in Portugal can be compelled to provide information at an inquest; providing false information is a crime. While executives responsible for criminal investigations stated this power was rarely invoked, it could be used to impel cooperation from informants and witnesses, suggesting that decriminalisation left the PSP with notable legal prerogatives in its pursuit of drug traffickers. Talking about the dual identity of PWUD in the eyes of the police that these prerogatives implied, the PSP’s national commander of criminal investigations noted, They are treated like a person that needs help, yes, but is also a person of interest in a criminal case … I think it’s a good symbiosis. Across participants, police in our study also felt that decriminalisation still allowed for the effective targeting of drug trafficking operations and did not hurt the quality of their related investigations. They articulated a national strategy that prioritised higher-level traffickers unlikely to consort with PWUD. Instead, these investigations required more sophisticated forms of surveillance and forensic accounting that were not hampered by the decriminalisation of personal drug possession. Likewise, all executives and agents running investigations (save one junior patrol officer) found that street-level dealing could be addressed with observations and summary arrests that did not depend on the enforcement of low-level personal possession statutes. Public order Police and agency directors in Portugal’s drug policy regime disclosed that the disorder arising from problematic drug use was one of the political factors that motivated decriminalisation rather than a reason not to pursue it or to consider it impractical or unfeasible. Indeed, the initiative was specifically intended as one part of a strategy to protect the quality of life in public spaces. Five police executives noted that in Lisbon, addressing such issues with public drug use was simultaneously carried out with efforts on the part of the government and private interests to promote urban renewal, which critics have construed as promoting gentrification or otherwise protecting the interests of real estate investors. Regardless of the motives, all police (with the exception of one junior patrol officer) noted that drug decriminalisation did not significantly disempower the police as actors with order maintenance responsibilities. Since drugs nonetheless remained a form of contraband under decriminalisation, officers exercising their lawful authority to confiscate drug supplies that would have to be replaced even without charging people for their possession created an incentive for people to use drugs in more private, less disruptive places. One PSP district commander of criminal investigation noted that police drug seizures were a source of concern among PWUD despite their knowledge that criminal charges would not follow. This served to regulate public behaviour, he said, since a person in possession of contraband drugs: … won’t be arrested, but the drug will be seized. There will be action by the state … The drug will be taken away and that person will feel that there has been a response from the authorities, even though it’s not a crime. Officers retain multiple discretionary means to remove people in possession of drugs from public places. These centre on the need to establish that a substance was indeed a drug, what type it was, that officers had found all of a person’s supply and that the total weight indicated personal use. Such investigations could take time and require searching PWUD for additional contraband. When a search might not respect a person’s privacy if done in public, it justifies removal to a police facility if there is not a suitably private place nearby. Police noted that undertaking these steps is discretionary and a person could be released from the scene with instructions to appear in front of a CDT, but these prerogatives provide a lawful means to address public order problems by removing disruptive PWUD to a police facility for civil processing. Beyond these means, police are also able to remove a person to a police facility to process them for any violation of the criminal law that may have accompanied drug possession, such as disorderly conduct or theft, as well as to a medical facility if there is cause to believe the person is having a mental health crisis. A former District Chief of Operations and current professor of criminal justice at Portugal’s Institute for Police Sciences and Homeland Security discussed how the removal of someone apprehended with illegal drugs remains a tool for police to address community quality of life issues, stating that I can … bring him to the police station to see if it’s really drugs, to test the product, to notify … our drug commission. I bring him to the police station. Obviously if he’s doing some other kind of behaviour that puts him in danger of the public order, I can remove him to the station … . If he’s having a psychological behaviour that was provoked by the drug consumption, I can remove him because of the public health situation. This removal, police claimed, did not suggest individuals were criminals or had forfeited their civil rights simply by virtue of using drugs, but rather was justified by a process meant to ensure that the person and the public were safe and that the person’s referral to the CDT was based on the possession of a qualifying quantity of actual narcotics in conformance with the law. Citing the fact that Portugal emerged in 1974 from a dictatorship in which the government’s secret police would detain and imprison dissidents, police stressed that these prerogatives were permitted by law since the police in post-revolution Portugal had an explicit duty to be sensitive to individual liberties. To wit, if the only act suspected was the possession of contraband drugs below the personal use threshold, the police encounter, even those resulting in removal, would almost always end with the person being free to leave without facing criminal charges. It should be noted that the study did not probe or observe how the commitment to individual liberties was honoured in policing drugs or other matters such as immigration enforcement. Two staff members at the health and wellness site related that in certain interactions at the site, police exhibited an adversarial relationship with PWUD (expanded below). Police perspectives on their relationship with the public In a study of decriminalisation in Oregon, PWUD voiced the hope that it would catalyse an improved relationship between police and the public ( Good et al. 2025 ). Police in this study believed it did so in Portugal, with street-level officers and regional commanders reporting that decriminalisation allowed them to relate to PWUD, their families and associates in a more productive manner. Consistent with the general tenor of such relationships in nations where drug possession is a crime, police and non-police participants with longitudinal experience characterised pre-decriminalisation relationships with PWUD as highly adversarial. With the threat of arrest and criminal charges removed from the calculus of interactions between PWUD and the PSP, however, participants reported that friends and family members of PWUD were more likely to proactively disclose a person’s substance use disorder to police to coordinate a response or channel services their way. One district commander pointed out that family members sometimes worked in concert with the police, since decriminalisation eliminated obstacles for those who worried about the criminal consequences of substance use. According to him, this encouraged families to consider the police a resource: This legislation is very positive in this regard … we’re thinking a little more about the neighbourhoods, about the issue of consumption, and I’m always thinking about the issue of consumption with people … the family has to be involved in the treatment process. An effect of decriminalisation, participants remarked, was to provide a way for the adversarial relationship between police and PWUD to transform into one where problematic drug use was understood as the result of a medical condition deserving of treatment, without the dilemma of a law that implied police ought to arrest them for it. Several respondents echoed the sentiment of one junior patrol officer who had served with the PSP for less than five years. In voicing the dual role of the PSP as a conduit to treatment and as criminal investigators, he stated … … what I usually say is that the user is a sick person, not exactly a criminal … decriminalisation probably helps in that respect. And it gives us the possibility of not really harming the person and making them feel more comfortable talking to us, to really tell us who is selling. Suggested in this and other similar statements by executives and lower-ranking officers, police do not articulate a distinction between PWUD and problematic drug users employing the evaluative criteria of the CDTs. Rather, these police note the difference between PWUD and those whose drug use causes personally deleterious behaviour and community quality of life issues. From the police perspective, the policy allows them to better address what they see as potentially negative consequences of drug use, affecting both individuals and the communities they police. Perceiving problematic use as a medical condition, rather than a criminal act, allowed these police to reframe their role managing drug use in the community. Evolving attitudes A theme emerging in the interviews stated by police and non-police respondents was the gradual acceptance of decriminalisation among police over time, culminating in their widespread support of the policy as a basic feature of Portuguese policing. Multiple police and health care officials remarked that police had little role in the initial deliberations about decriminalisation, with their involvement indistinguishable from other civic institutions or the general public, coming in the form of individual parliamentary testimony and statements to news outlets. These initial statements were in opposition to the measure based on concerns about an increase in undesirable drug tourism and that it would increase rates of addiction among youth, who would interpret decriminalisation as a cue that substance use had become socially acceptable. The PSP national drug policy coordinator characterised the thinking of sceptical colleagues prior to implementation with the worry that ‘Portugal is going to be a drug addict’s paradise … Portugal is going to explode.’ Over time, however, these concerns gave way to an understanding that while drug trafficking is a crime, problematic substance use might be better characterised as a relapsing medical condition with personal and social consequences that criminal prosecution was unlikely to improve. It is a belief now widely shared across the ranks and assignments of the PSP participants in this study, with the drug policy transforming the role of police in Portuguese society. A national PSP executive voiced the belief that this evolution occurred as the result of an iterative partnership with other disciplines that was a hallmark of Portugal’s particular approach to decriminalisation from the outset: Partnerships with other sectors were also important, because at that time, police were still somehow very closed, and this was good to have conversations, discussions with the health sector, with sociologists, with judges and prosecutors about this. This was also good for the police, because we opened to society more than we were before … to discuss this type of issue. Also giving our opinion, because we were one of the partners. We were giving our opinion and were considered by the other sectors the most conservative within the system. But they also understood our vision. So, this exchange of information, this cooperation is important. It was also important not to not work alone but work in partnerships. All participants were questioned about their own views on the appropriateness and acceptability of decriminalisation. Only one felt decriminalisation was inappropriate: a comparatively young patrol officer who desired more legal authority to coerce PWUD to broadly comply with the nation’s criminal laws. Respondents observed that PSP members working at the time of the change had years to observe its constructive results, and generations of new officers entered the profession with decriminalisation as a basic feature of the overarching system they worked in, one that they had come to take for granted as a feature of their role. Our sample noted that the result was an eventual acceptance of decriminalisation among veterans, and widespread initial acceptance among officers hired after the change. A PSP national-level executive pointed out that From the beginning we were … greatly suspicious. But then we started to understand. After several months, one year, two years after. We were involved in several training actions and inducted our police officers who started to have sensitiveness. I think decriminalisation was the right option, and it worked. As the policy became a fundamental part of policing in Portugal, these initially widespread suspicions dissipated among the study’s participants. The national drug policy coordinator underlined this point, stating: At the beginning it was difficult, because it was already [accepted] that drug addiction was associated with crimes … consumption itself was a crime …. the older agents who were already in the old guard, who had a different view of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. But then all that faded away. And now we’re talking about a modern police force, modern police officers who are more sensitive to this issue. The executives in our sample noted evolving aspects of the system that increasingly limited its effectiveness; however. Two significant ones were diminished housing resources for unsheltered PWUD, which they felt prevented full engagement with treatment and recovery, and budgets for treatment and recovery that were either frozen or had shrunk as a result of austerity cuts and restructuring in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, which was acutely felt in Portugal, along with a belief that the programme’s success was evidence it could be scaled back. Participants attributed these financial concerns to reporting prior to the study that decriminalisation in Portugal was struggling ( Faiola and Martins 2023 ), rather than a problem with decriminalisation itself. Finally, it is important to note that this evolution in sensibilities was not without residual tensions inherent to the police role. PSP officers regularly entered Lisbon’s overdose prevention/safe use centre to serve the civil notices prepared by the municipality’s CDT, knowing it is a place where they might find a particular client who uses drugs, especially since unsheltered PWUD often use the centre as their mailing address. While PWUD are not subject to enforcement on the premises, a police presence is understandably unwelcome, and there were reports that officers routinely ignored requests by staff, especially women, to limit the intrusiveness of their visits. As a peer counsellor at Lisbon’s overdose prevention/safe use centre disclosed, staff felt the need to protect their clients from unwanted intrusions by the PSP: When [police] come here … they’re always very overbearing. They don’t ask permission to come in, they can come in anywhere …. Several times they wanted to go in and get people and we said no, you stay outside and wait until the person comes out, then you’ll talk. These dynamics indicate that the relationship between the PSP, PWUD and the people who deliver services to them is not without unresolved conflicts, even if decriminalisation may have lessened them. By this account, the role of the police as the executors of the legal process (even civil proceedings, as in the case of serving notices from the CDT), combined with the exercise of their power to enter semi-public places (regardless of the desires of the principal users of those places or the potential to undermine a facility’s purpose), serves to illustrate the oft-repeated concern that police practices can conflict with an approach to PWUD that puts public health needs and preferences as the top priority. Discussion This is the first empirical study undertaken with and about Portuguese Police to examine their experience with decriminalised drug possession, especially as it concerns their core missions of public safety and preserving quality of life in public spaces. Leveraging the well-supported idea that treating substance use disorder not only protects individuals’ health, but prevents the spread of infectious disease and addresses the addictive behaviours that can motivate crime and disorder, this study highlights aspects of Portugal’s approach to decriminalisation that contributed to its feasibility, acceptability and sustainability from the perspective of the nation’s urban police force, the PSP. Among them was a decriminalisation regime that left police with prerogatives similar to the ones used by police in other settings engaged in de facto criminalisation, where they reported using their discretion to invoke the law as a problem-solving tool to address disorder and other public safety concerns when needed ( Greer et al. 2022a ). Such findings reinforce the view that Portugal’s decriminalisation was more modest in scope than popularly perceived ( Laqueur 2015 ), especially in contrast to more recent de jure attempts to emulate it in North America. Paternalism, disapproval and stigma Portuguese decriminalisation, in practice, has been accompanied by policing tactics that advocates of most harm reduction-oriented approaches in North America and beyond are likely to find unacceptable. One is the confiscation of illicit drugs as a means of disrupting public consumption and incentivising use in private, a tactic that may expose people to elevated risk of overdose ( Ray et al. 2023 ) along a casual pathway ( del Pozo et al. 2025a ) that has been echoed by both police and PWUD ( Carroll et al. 2020 , del Pozo et al. 2025b ). The research on this topic suggests that the elevated risk derives in great part from the volatility and potency of an illicit opioid supply consisting primarily of fentanyl. This does not characterise the opioid supply in Portugal; however, it is unclear how such a risk plays out in our study setting, although fear of confiscation may nonetheless result in rushed injections, using alone and other more hazardous practices ( del Pozo et al. 2025b ). Another example is when police enter a city’s overdose prevention/safe use centre to serve PWUD with reminders to comply with the civil process managed by the city’s CDT; they disrupt its function. Finally, the removal of people to police facilities for search and civil processing and the possibility of compelled testimony against drug dealers during an inquest are all measures that would likely be explicitly rejected by the architects of decriminalisation measures as overbearing and contrary to the goals of reform. The role of the police in Portugal also exemplifies a tension inherent to its drug policy: the desire to signal strong disapproval of substance use to discourage initiation and motivate recovery, while avoiding the lasting stigma that afflicts people who have engaged in something harmful and disruptive enough to generate strong disapproval from broad swaths of the public. A critique of Oregon and British Columbia’s approaches is that their policies did little to affirm the message that problematic substance use is, in fact, problematic ( Humphreys 2024 ). There is evidence from British Columbia, for example, that the manner in which it implemented decriminalisation may instead have had the opposite effect, increasing the public’s resentment towards PWUD by exacerbating the prevalence of disruptive substance use rather than acknowledging its effects and enforcing the legal prohibitions against them ( Ali et al. 2025 ). Some scholars have argued that Portugal’s distinction between criminalisation and disapproval is inherently insufficient to address stigma ( Rego et al. 2021 ), while others posit that policymakers must contend with its sharp divergence from libertarian motives for decriminalisation, which were a driving cultural force in Oregon’s Pacific Northwest ( Humphreys 2024 ) and among advocates at the US national level. For example, the Cato Institute’s commitment to libertarianism led its staff to argue that Oregon should have gone further than decriminalisation by fully legalising and regulating drug sales and use as a basic element of a free market ( Miron and Winter 2022 ). In contrast, Portugal’s approach makes a key assumption that criminalisation is among the most powerful stigmatising forces of PWUD. Decriminalisation within an overall system of compassionate dissuasion and regulating public substance use can thread the needle ( Gilroy 2023 ) between the stigmatisation of criminalising drug use while retaining societal disapprobation that might otherwise discourage problematic drug use. This is a sentiment affirmed by PWUD in Scher et al.’s (2023) qualitative study about stigma’s roots in criminalisation and the potential of decriminalisation to prevent it. Our findings suggest that Portugal’s attempt to do so created a system that police came to find acceptable, allowing them to pursue adjacent goals of maintaining public safety and quality of life in public spaces, which made the initiative sustainable as a result. The Portuguese paradigm, in stopping well short of legalisation, centres police intervention as a vital component of the strategy’s primary objective. Police are relied upon to provide PWUD with multiple points of entry to health care services and harm reduction measures in an effort to keep them alive and as healthy as possible while attempting to dissuade them from continuing with problematic substance use . A secondary outcome, however, is also in line with the paradigm. The role and powers retained by police signal that drug use has societal disapprobation. Some scholars and activists take the position that there is no distinction between disapprobation and stigmatisation, concluding that societal disapproval is inherently stigmatising ( Rego et al. 2021 ). The Portuguese approach, however, represents an attempt to separate these concepts, a point reinforced by both the stated roles of the police and CDT in the national drug strategy and how they were portrayed by participants in this study. In these formulations, the police role is part of an effort to promote a society in which PWUD are better prepared and better able to make healthier choices and a posture of paternalism is a central element of this effort ( Watkins 2022 , Debbaut and Kammersgaard 2023 ). Regardless of whether Portugal’s policy is evaluated through a comparatively conservative harm reduction lens or the nascent lens of mindful consumption and benefit maximisation ( Bear et al. 2025 ), it acknowledges the need to regulate personal use to protect public health and safety. Considering that in North American drug policy reform settings, this distinction has been largely portrayed as the difference between harmful stigma that impedes treatment and recovery while accepting PWUD as people who are free to exercise their autonomy in deciding when they seek care for their disorder or if they even believe they have one – positions cast as largely exclusive. Future research should examine the nature, acceptability, effectiveness and operationalisation of paternalistic approaches that intend to be more nuanced. Implementation science in future drug policy research The data here suggest that implementation science, which is notably underutilised in police settings ( del Pozo et al. 2024 ), should be leveraged to better understand Portugal’s decriminalisation and to plan drug policy innovation in other settings. A recent policy analysis illustrated how several key factors aligned to motivate and sustain Portugal’s programme. It cited highly deliberate, well-resourced implementation as the final critical factor ( Moury and Escada 2023 ), suggesting that a rigorous analysis of the process would be beneficial to policymakers, especially as it identifies specific implementation determinants ( CFIR 2023 ), strategies ( Powell et al. 2015 ) and outcomes ( Proctor et al. 2011 ) that can be operationalised and rigorously studied. To that end, participants provided insights that cleanly map onto the domains and constructs of the Consolidated Framework for Research Implementation ( CFIR 2023 ) and well-accepted implementation frameworks can provide the basis for a retrospective study. For example, participants highlighted the integration between police, CDTs and the nation’s larger health care system, which asserts the importance of an alignment between an innovation’s inner and outer domains. Likewise, the Exploration, Preparation, Implementation and Sustainment framework ( EPIS 2023 ) substantively mirrors the de facto process of implementation related by participants in the PSP study, although a rigorous operationalisation of its phases and determinants was outside the scope of this investigation. Nonetheless, this mirroring demonstrates the framework’s potential value as a tool for applying implementation science to drug policy design and execution. Considering recent data finds that police executives believe poor implementation is a principal reason for failures of innovation and alternatives to arrest usually suffer from being more onerous than the processes they replace ( del Pozo et al. 2026 ), implementation science would offer considerable value in rigorously articulating the successful process of decriminalisation in Portugal, as well as carefully planning drug policy reform in other jurisdictions. While our present study does not operationalise the variables of implementation science with enough precision to yield independent findings, it does provide the data necessary for hypothesis formation and study design and highlights how key implementation concerns in other national police settings were approached in Portugal. Limitations and safeguards The key informants selected in this study were those with deep firsthand knowledge of Portuguese policing, from street-level operations to the highest levels of leadership (which were well-sampled nationally) and the number of participants was more than sufficient for saturation, with a recent systematic review indicating that the number of participants necessary for saturation in a relatively homogenous population rarely exceeds 17 but is often as low as nine ( Hennink and Kaiser 2022 ). Moreover, the sample contained nearly all the officers who personally developed, implemented and administered the policy under study, underscoring the plausibility of rapid saturation among this sample. While the study’s key informants served in singular roles that precluded the PSP’s ability to cherrypick participants for their willingness to relate a particular narrative, it is nonetheless possible that a participant’s statements reflected their desire to present the nation’s decriminalisation programme in an overly favourable light, or to stress its strengths and successful aspects while masking shortcomings. To guard against this bias, we asked similar questions of participants with overlapping roles and responsibilities and we compared the sentiments of senior executives with those of junior officers in less overtly political roles. While one junior officer differed in a subjective assessment of decriminalisation, we noted no other significant tensions between statements about process and policy, although it is possible that their recollections systematically lacked a critical lens, or may have been tempered by the simple passage of time. Although some participants with longstanding public-facing roles consented to identification in this study, we stressed that our research protocol offered anonymity protections designed to encourage candour for participants who did not regularly speak publicly about decriminalisation. To further cross-check the findings, we interviewed non-police actors who inhabited roles traditionally thought to be at odds with police-centred approaches to substance use and addiction, to include the staff of an overdose prevention/safe use centre, as well as the director of a mobile methadone and drug checking clinic. While they were sometimes critical of the sensibilities and brusqueness of rank-and-file Portuguese officers, the data they supplied did not contradict our findings about how the PSP policed public substance use and other potentially disruptive behaviours. In the midst of the Portuguese interviews, there were times when the English-only speakers in the study team were dependent on the in-situ interpretation of the two bilingual investigators. Consistent conferrals between these two investigators and in-depth conversations between all members of the study team, which explicitly discussed meaning and nuance, were employed to guard against this possible limitation. Finally, all Portuguese interviews were formally transcribed and translated, then checked for accuracy, complemented by cross-checking results and ensuring consensus among the investigative team. Conclusion A global consensus between police and health care providers that problematic substance use disorder is a chronic, relapsing medical condition poorly suited for criminalisation would be a momentous shift, but it has not been forthcoming. That it has largely occurred in Portugal among our sample of police provides an opportunity to understand what drove this evolution, and how it contributed to the sustainability of a pathbreaking decriminalisation policy across three decades. The data suggest that decriminalisation of drug possession may have become acceptable to police because it was implemented in a way that ensured it was effective as a public health initiative while acknowledging the police role of promoting public safety and maintaining quality of life in public spaces. This is an important distinction between Portugal and Oregon or British Columbia, where decriminalisation was explicitly framed as a means to reduce the role and authority of police; indeed, it was often framed as a social justice reform as much as a public health innovation ( Virani and Haines-Saah 2020 , Earp et al. 2021 ), with a corresponding reduction in the volume of drug arrests ( Davis et al. 2023 ), if not the associated racial disparities ( Rouhani et al. 2023 ). Nonetheless, in Portugal, the central role of the police in operationalising the nation’s decriminalisation strategy has innovated the police role in society. Reducing the morbidity and mortality of PWUD should always be a top priority of a government, but it is not the only one. Future drug policy reforms can maximise their chances of success by engaging in a collaborative approach across sectors that involves careful planning and implementation and that acknowledges the full range of health and justice interests at work. Funding This research was supported by awards from the National Institute on Drug Abuse [grant number: K01DA056654] and the Rhode Island Foundation, both to Dr. del Pozo. Footnotes Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). References Ali F, et al. , 2025. Experiences of stigmatization among people who use drugs in the initial year of British Columbia’s drug decriminalization policy: A qualitative study. International journal of drug policy, 139, 104791. 10.1016/j.drugpo.2025.104791 [ DOI ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ] Arredondo J, et al. , 2018. The law on the streets: evaluating the impact of Mexico’s drug decriminalization reform on drug possession arrests in Tijuana, Mexico. 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