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Goulao says Coelho’s criticisms put him in the minority in Portugal now, and notes there was tremendous pressure 15 years ago to take strong action on what was the country’s leading political issue.

“We had nothing to lose, so Portugal became a sort of social laboratory where we developed this experiment.”

If drug users are “intercepted” by police now and have less than a 10-day personal supply, they are delivered to a three-person “commission for the dissuasion of drug addiction.”

The panel can levy fines or community service but also tries to get to the bottom of the person’s drug problem and prescribe a response, from methadone treatment to better housing and mental-health services.

Alex Stevens, a criminal-justice professor at Britain’s University of Kent, says he has tried to take a “nuanced” approach to analyzing the hotly debated reforms — and still found a mostly positive effect.

Drug-caused deaths in the population of 10 million have plummeted from close to 80 a year in 2001 to less than 20, a rate far below the European Union’s average, he reports. The number of new HIV infections due to intravenous drug use has also plunged — from more than 1,000 in 2001 to less than 100 in 2013.

The actual use of drugs overall did appear to climb in the first years, but has since decreased, while the number of “problematic” users — cocaine and heroin addicts — has declined steadily, said Stevens.

Back in Canada, the Liberal plan seems to go beyond the European country’s criminal-justice changes, and yet misses out on the “creative” measures it took to improve addicts’ lives, argues Kevin Sabet, a former White House advisor and head of SAM, an anti-marijuana-legalization group.

Proponents of more liberalization actually agree that a package of programs — not just changing the criminal law — is essential, but stress that Portugal’s reforms spoke particularly loudly about treating drug use as a crime.

“As one of my colleagues said: ‘The most important thing about the Portuguese model is that they did this (decriminalization), and nothing bad happened,’ ” says Donald MacPherson, director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. “In fact, good things happened.”

• Email: tblackwell@nationalpost.com | Twitter: TomblackwellNP