Seguro’s victory was widely interpreted as a rebuke to the far right and a reaffirmation of Portugal’s democratic and constitutional traditions.
At the heart of most debates on how the state should respond to the use of controlled drugs is an assumption that the threat of punishment affects levels of use
There is an interesting story in today's Independent, flagged in Left Foot Forward's Politics Summary, which reports that a group of government-appointed drug experts are to call for a nationwide network of "shooting galleries" to provide injectable heroin for drug addicts following successful trials. The current Government is on record many times insisting that their policies will be based as far as possible on evidence. In the area of drugs policy, however, there have been two recent occasions when the government has gone against their own advisory body.