Ending the Epidemic: The Portugal Solution

A small country, a world away from Boston, is winning the war on drugs.

Just 15 years ago, Portugal was a much different place than it is today. It was hard to miss the people dying from heroin overdoses like what we see all over the United States.

Portugal is roughly the same geographic size of Maine, but with more than 10 million people living there. That’s about the same as the populations of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine combined.

According to the latest statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, opioids killed more than 42,000 people in 2016. That’s more than any year on record – and it’s still rising.

In Massachusetts alone, nearly 2,000 people died from overdosing on opioids.

Like many communities in the U.S., Portugal seemed like a haven for heroin addicts, but now it is surviving the opioid epidemic.

The rate of deaths from opioid overdoses has dropped by about 90 percent in the last decade.

Could the Portugal Solution work here?