Perhaps more importantly, while the number of people taking drugs may have gone down slightly, the level of problem drug use fell much more dramatically, says Fordham, “because people were more willing to come forward and seek treatment”. According to research by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the number of people receiving treatment for HIV leapt from 6,000 in 1999 up to more than 14,000 in 2003. Meanwhile, the number of new cases was plummeting. According to Dagmar Hedrich, of the EMCDDA, there were almost 100 new drug-related HIV cases per million people in Portugal in 2001; by 2012, it was just five. The rate of HIV infection had dropped by almost 95 per cent in barely a decade.