Bye-bye hopes of a happy new year

No sooner had families and friends around the world exchanged best wishes for a healthy, happy and prosperous 2015 than the news broke about Her Majesty’s second son.

A woman alleged that a billionaire American investment banker used her as an under-age ‘sex slave’ and forced her to have repeated sexual relations in London, New York and on a private Caribbean island with rich and famous friends, including Prince Andrew.

This came on top of reported evidence that 22 Westminster politicians abused children, or were involved in child abuse cover-ups, and that the number of paedophile victims all across the UK could runs to tens of thousands.

In abuse of another kind, a Florida man has been charged with first-degree murder for decapitating his mother on New Year’s Eve. Christian Gomez, 23, had allegedly plotted his mother’s murder because she had asked him to do domestic chores.

In a shopping centre up in Idaho, a two-year-old baby boy shot and killed his mother with a pistol he found by unzipping a special purse she had been given as a Christmas present.Why the young mother felt the need to carry a gun while out shopping remained unclear, at least to Europeans, especially as she was described as “a motivated academic and a successful nuclear research scientist.”

With considerable military efficiency, hooded gunmen killed and injured many people on January 7 in another attack on the Paris offices of a satirical magazine renowned for poking fun at extreme Islamists. The magazine had been the target of a fire-bombing in 2011 after publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.

Nothing quite so odious has occurred since the start of the year in Portugal, but the headline news has been no less bewildering.

“There is no justice in Portugal,” wrote Mário Soares in an article in the Jornal de Notícias. Many of his fellow citizens might loosely agree. Even so, it was an amazing statement coming from a former President of the Republic, former prime minister and one of the heroes of the 1974 revolution that replaced dictatorship with democracy.

Soares was referring to the treatment of another former socialist prime minister, and a good friend, José Sócrates, who has been languishing in jail while an inquiry is conducted into his suspected involvement in corruption, tax fraud and money laundering.

In written answers to questions from the national television station TV1, Sócrates insisted in no uncertain terms that the allegations against him were false and defamatory, that he was the victim of a criminal violation of justice and that his imprisonment was a “cowardly act of aggression.”   

Meanwhile the current President of the Republic Aníbal Cavaco Silva ignored Soares’ challenge to intervene and have Sócrates freed. Instead he used his traditional New Year’s message to assert that the economy is growing, competitiveness is improving, unemployment is diminishing and investment is starting out on a path of recovery.

Unfortunately, the head of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi used a New Year interview to declare that Europe faced a “long period of weakness” with the “growing risk of price instability.” The euro promptly dropped to a nine-year low against the US dollar.

Despite Cavaco Silva’s pep talk, the government’s new ‘green tax came into force on New Year’s Day, hiking fuel prices in Portugal while they continue to plummet in the rest of Europe.

One driver in particular was rather less concerned about the price of petrol than the cost of his failure to pay a €1.60 motorway toll. With fines and charges added, he received a bill for €72,000. 

In addition to the stories short on news of either happiness or prosperity, most of the papers in Portugal ran one that questioned our chances of good health in the year ahead. It revealed that this year’s batch of flu vaccine will give no more than 50-50 protection against the latest aggressive strain of the flu virus, which may reach epidemic proportions as it is the same virus that sparked a pandemic in 1968.

Perhaps the most perplexing news was contained in the science section of Tuesday’s Diário de Noticías. A Portuguese university team has won a competition organised by a Dutch foundation with a project that aims to supply seeds for germinating on Mars during an unmanned mission there in 2018. Full marks to the winning team, but does the Red Planet really need any human input?
       For plain silliness, though, it was hard to beat the story about a planeload of Lisbon passengers disembarking at London’s Stanstead Airport. The crew of the Ryanair flight said they directed the passengers to an assigned arrivals gate. Instead, the passengers walked through an exit door ‘left open in error’ and ended up in the departures area. The shambles that ensued caused long security-check queues and take-off delays.

Any good news at the start of the new year? Well, it didn’t make it into the headlines but House Martins, which are largely immune to human lunacy, are gearing up for their epic journey back to Portugal and the rest of Europe from their winter sojourn in sub-Saharan Africa. And one of Portugal and southern Europe’s most attractive and delightfully well-organised resident birds, the Hoopoe, has already started nesting.

Blocking out global warming worries

Climate change is arguably the biggest threat that humanity has ever faced and so perhaps it should have repeatedly dominated the headlines this past year, if not the past decade. It didn’t because discussion on the subject is so confusing and implicitly terrifying that many people don’t even want to think about it.

Academic debate rages about whether or not the globe really is warming – or if so, why, by how much, and what should be done about it.  

The majority of leading scientific authorities argue that the surface temperatures of the Earth have been rising since 1900 - increasingly so in the last four decades.

The Royal Society, Britain’s pre-eminent scientific association, is in little doubt as to why: “It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing the Earth’s climate.”

On what may lie ahead, the British Society is equally confident: “Long-term climate change over many decades will depend mainly on the total amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases emitted as a result of human activities.”

Others are bolder in the views. George Marshall, the Oxford-based founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network, points out in a new book that “scientists who are, as a group, extremely wary of exaggeration, nonetheless keep using the same word: catastrophe.”

But sceptics insist the theory of ‘catastrophic’ global warming is doom mongering and a fraudulent scientific conspiracy. Some have dubbed it ‘the greatest scam in history.’ 

Paradoxically, the fuss is about only a few degrees. The word ‘catastrophe’ enters the fray to describe what the world can expect if the climate warms by more than 2ºC.

‘Catastrophe’ may seem a little strong for a small amount of warming, but even a change of a few degrees could have extremely negative effects on agriculture, food production and fisheries in Portugal as elsewhere.  

If it were to stretch to 4ºC, sea levels would rise so much that not only small towns and resorts in the Algarve, but Lisbon and two-thirds of the world’s other major cities would end up underwater.

One of the world’s most influential climate scientists, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber believes, “The difference between two and four degrees is human civilisation.” Along with many fellow-scientists, he thinks the 4ºC scenario is increasingly likely.

Four degrees of warming overall would make it two degrees warmer in some places, 12 degrees or more in others. The world, much of it then uninhabitable, would be hotter than at any time in the last 30 million years.

This could happen by 2060 – in other words, if not in our lifetime then in the lifetime of our children or grandchildren.

Portugal is thought to be one of the countries most vulnerable to global warming in Europe. Sea levels along the shores of the mainland have been rising annually by more than 4mm over the past decade, twice those in the previous two decades, according to a government-commissioned report.

Rises in average summer season temperatures of up to 7ºC are predicted for the mainland, though only 2-3ºC in Madeira and 1-2ºC in the Azores.   

Referring to a report released last month by the World Meteorological Organization, the Scientific American magazine ran an article stating that 2014 will likely prove to have been the hottest on record for the planet. “This would make 2014 the 38th consecutive year with an anomalously high annual global temperature.”

Such assertions are dismissed by sceptics who insist that the latest scientific evidence shows that while carbon dioxide emissions have risen, there has been little or no global warming since 1998. 

According to climate specialists Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt, who have examined historical temperature data recorded by weather stations in Lisbon and Coimbra over the last 140 years,  the temperature has risen by nearly one degree since 1850, but there has been no warming either in Portugal or globally in the past 16 years.

“Hardly known today is the fact that around 1950 temperatures in Portugal were as warm over a ten-year period as they are today. And 60 years before that, during the late 19th century, another warm peak had occurred in Portugal, though temperatures were not quite as high as modern levels.”

Those in the sceptical camp claim that the catastrophe hypothesis is a socialist plot designed to curb capitalism.

The retort from the other side is that ‘denial’ of global warming is being engineered and funded by right-wing elitists with vested interests in the oil industry.

On carbon emissions, however, there is some common agreement that the levels are rising and that something ought to be done about it.

Portugal is only a small country but it is doing its bit to cut fossil fuel dependency, expand renewable use and generally strengthen its climate policies.

A survey in 2014 confirmed Portugal’s high standing among the 58 countries responsible for more than 90 percent of global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.

The biggest polluters, including China, Russia, India and the US, have been ducking and diving on this issue since the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Copenhagen summit in 2009 and 18 other major meetings under the auspices of the United Nations. The latest, a few weeks ago in Lima, Peru, offered a glimmer of hope.

“Governments took a step back from chaos in the climate change discussions in Lima and found a way forward,” reported the Guardian, “albeit with some fudges and compromises, giving themselves just 12 months to finalise a crucial international agreement to avoid dangerous levels of global warming.”  

The only startling news to come out of the Lima conference, attended by representatives from 195 countries, was that a group of Greenpeace eco-warriors distinguished themselves by trampling over an ancient UNESCO World Heritage Site “while setting up one of their sanctimonious, publicity-grabbing stunts,” as a sceptical columnist in the Sunday Times put it.

Environmentalists everywhere are fed up because top-level political shilly-shallying has been going on for well over a decade. Now would be a good time for world leaders to stop procrastinating and start turning words into action.

They are in no great hurry, of course, as governments rarely have a long-term vision, being focused only on their next election. The next summit, in Paris, will not be until towards the end of 2015.

As for the rest of us, we can barely cope with all the bad news about wars and terrorist savagery, corruption and economic crises, let alone the terrifying prospect of a global climate catastrophe.

As supposedly the most intelligent of species with dominion over all others, the title of George Marshall’s new book - Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change - speaks volumes about what a hopeless lot we humans are when it comes to looking after life on our planet.

A new shake-up in the Madeleine case?

The Operation Grange investigation by the Metropolitan Police into the disappearance of  Madeleine McCann is said to be “upbeat” and set to continue despite mounting costs, a top resignation and apparently still no breakthrough in sight.

The latest episode in this extraordinary case, with Scotland Yard detectives questioning ten people in Faro, does not seem to have resulted in any meaningful progress.

 The previous high point in the investigation featured British police searching across three sites next to Praia da Luz in the summer. Scorned by sceptics as a ‘whitewash’ and a ‘circus,’ the searches produced no new evidence and gave rise not only to exasperation among local citizens, but also speculation that the investigation was nearing its endgame.

The speculation heightened with news that the cost of the inquiry was approaching £10 million at a time of stringent budget cuts that could have disastrous consequences for police forces across the UK.   

The announcement that Detective Chief Inspector Andy Redwood was retiring from the Met as the head of Operation Grange further invigorated the notion that the case was going nowhere.

“After careful consideration and a full and rewarding career in the Met, the time is right for me to move on,” Redwood said.

A headline in the Mirror declared: “Madeleine McCann top cop quits: This does send a certain kind of message.”

The paper reported that with Redwood’s resignation, “the inquiry into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann suffered a blow.” It went on to quote a source close to the inquiry: “The investigation has gone on for three and a half years now. However a lead detective would not typically stand down if they can see a result in the pipeline.”

If this did indeed send “a certain kind of message,” it was somewhat confused by the simultaneous announcement that DCI Nicola Wall was to replace Redwood as leader of the Operation Grange team.

This left some observers wondering if the latest questioning in Faro was a last ditch effort that might soon lead to a formal wrapping up of the investigation.

Not so, apparently.

Anthony Summers, co-author with his wife Robbyn Swan of the book Looking for Madeleine, told the BBC Breakfast programme that, according to his sources, the Operation Grange team is “upbeat and believes the case is solvable.”

There is said to be no political pressure, no hidden agenda and no pressure or problem about expenditure.

The team still comprises about 30 officers and support staff, essentially the same number as earlier in the investigation. The expectation is that they will continue ploughing methodically though a vast amount of information.

So, the indications are that although the investigation is taking a very long time with apparently little success, this should not be interpreted as meaning that detectives are pessimistic about the case or about to give up.

It has been known by insiders for some months that Redwood was going to retire. But immediately after the announcement, the Mirror quoted a senior Labour MP as saying: “There are times when public duty must override personal circumstances, and this is one of them. If senior officers were aware of the DCI’s retirement plans, why was he put on to this case in the first place?”

Interesting question, but this is a side issue.

The main thrust is that Nicola Wall has now met the senior Portuguese officials she will be collaborating with after formally taking command of Operation Grange on 22 December.

When Inês Sequeira was appointed Portimão’s new public prosecutor in October she was quoted in the press as being “utterly determined” to crack the case.

She has the backing of Portugal’s first woman attorney general, Joana Marques Vidal, Portimão’s PJ chief, Ana Paula Rito, and the Oporto-based PJ detective in charge of the Portuguese investigation, Helena Monteiro.

Nicola Wall has served at the Met for 26 years, most recently as head of the Murder Investigation Team in West London. Hitherto she has not had much media coverage, but that’s about to change.

Vogue magazine last year reported that she prided herself on her investigative speed; that she was only partially joking when she attributed her low media profile to the fact “we solve cases so quickly nobody gets involved.”
       An omen perhaps?

DCI Nicola Wall arriving at the PJ headquarters in Faro.

Human migration: madness in motion

Unlike birds and other creatures that migrate in an orderly and timely way, the mass movement of humans is shambolic.

We used to wander about freely hunting and gathering in small tribes. As human populations grew and greeds as well as needs became greater, the more developed tribes sent explorers forth to look for opportunities among vulnerable communities abroad. Invaders and colonisers followed.

Portugal and Spain appealed to Celtic, Roman and Moorish intruders. Britain attracted Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Normans.

The trend swivelled when the Portuguese, Spanish and later the British dispatched their brightest and bravest to set up shop in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Now we are into a different kind of mass movement in which the trend has done a U-turn: the former colonising countries are being colonised.

Accurate statistics are fleeting and iffy because of the erratic and sometimes illegal nature of migration, but according to the OECD the percentage of foreign-born citizens living in Portugal is about 8% compared with 12% in the UK and well over 14% in Spain.

In Portugal, foreign-born residents from outside the EU outnumber those from within by about four to one. The majority are from the former colony of Brazil. There are also plenty from the old African territories.

Being among the poorer European countries, Portugal is not fretting about being swamped by EU immigrants. They are seen as an asset not a threat. Over the past couple of decades, plenty of East Europeans have come to work hard. Reasonably well-off British citizens, who like to be thought of as ‘expatriates’ rather than immigrants, have ambled in to buy property and retire in the sun.

Alarmingly, however, with Portugal’s population ageing and its birth-rate dropping, there has been an exodus in recent years of well-educated young men and women seeking employment in the far-flung Portuguese-speaking diaspora.

Some are going to the US where Barack Obama recently emphasised that Americans “are and always will be, a nation of immigrants.” About 20% of all international migrants - nearly 41 million or about 13% of the total population - live in the US.

Obama’s decision to enact sweeping immigration reforms that would allow almost five million people to remain living in the country illegally has outraged Republicans. Immigration could become a central issue in the next US presidential election. It undoubtedly will be high on the agenda in the next general election in Britain.

David Cameron pledged last year to reduce the UK’s net migration rate to tens of thousands. Embarrassingly, the net figure to June 2014 has turned out to be a whopping 260,000. It could have been worse: Germany is much the preferred destination within Europe.

It’s not only the scale of immigration that currently has the British in a lather. The Brits see themselves as victims of their own economic strength and generous benefit schemes. It’s claimed that too many immigrants, especially those from cash-strapped Eastern Europe, turn out to be scroungers.

Because of the many indigenous people in Britain who say immigration is so far out of control that they feel like foreigners in their own land, a referendum on continued membership of the EU becomes ever more likely.

Well aware of the surge in euroscepticism and the need to placate anti-immigrant voters, Cameron said he would lead the UK out of the EU unless it reformed the ‘fundamental principle’ of free movement of workers.

He quickly backed down on his demand for a cap on the number of EU immigrants after German Chancellor Angela Merkel ‘sat on’ him and said the matter was non-negotiable.

Political squabbles don’t come into the equation for those from war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa paying big bribes to people smugglers to get them to the French port of Calais. If they manage to scramble past the high fences, riot police, sniffer dogs and ranks of carbon dioxide detectors at Calais docks, there’s a chance of making it across the English Channel to the new El Dorado.

By contrast, the controversial Golden Visa scheme (which the Portuguese government intends to continue) enables the wealthiest from China and elsewhere to become residents and travel freely within the Schengen countries of Europe. This despite the recent unveiling of a predictable scandal involving corrupt Portuguese government officials and property agents.

In some ways migration seems to have descended into madness, a frenzied free-for-all. Bar-tailed godwits and monarch moths behave with far more dignity.

Corruption: bringing down the mighty

A wise man once said, “Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad.”

Perhaps this was said at least partly in jest, but it is certainly true that corruption lurks in the shadows from the bottom to the very top of politics in many countries all over the world. Portugal’s reputation in this regard is far from the worst, but it is still appalling.

Abuse of power for private gain has long been suspected not only within parliament and local administrations, but also the judiciary, the police, the military, state agencies and nationalised and private businesses. Many if not most culprits get away with it of course.

Transparency International, which calls itself the leading civil society organisation fighting corruption worldwide, will launch its 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index on December 3. Portugal is likely to drop a peg or two from its position of 15th in the 28 EU countries and 33rd in the world.

Transparency International has been monitoring citizens’ perceptions annually for the past 20 years. Keeping scores like this is a helpful guide, but it doesn’t profess to tell anything like the whole story because corruption is such a crafty, behind closed doors and under-the-table activity. 

 According to this year’s anti-corruption report produced by the European Commission, 90% of the Portuguese population think corruption is widespread in this country. The average among EU member states is bad enough at 76%.

The same report reveals that more than 70% of those within companies who responded to the EC survey believe that corruption is a problem when doing business in Portugal.

Asked if they considered patronage and nepotism to be a problem for their company when doing business, the ‘yes’ figure was again about 70%. The great majority rated the ‘problems’ in doing business in Portugal as ‘serious’ or ‘very serious.’

Plenty of people also think the medical and health system is ‘corrupt’ or ‘extremely corrupt’ and that backhanders and kickbacks are sometimes involved in awarding public tenders, or the issuing of permits and licences for building works or safety and sanitary arrangements.

Trying to keep control on corruption in Portugal starts with the national anti-corruption unit of the Polícia Judiciária (UNCC). The investigation of misconduct and abuse of power committed by holders of political office is but one of UNCC’s responsibilities.

The prevention, detection and investigation of all kinds of embezzlement, influence peddling, fraud and forgery is up to the UNCC. Big job. Although the unit is said to be under-resourced, the arrest of former prime minister José Sócrates and the unearthing of the Golden Visa scandal suggests that investigators have been working at full throttle.

How these new corruption cases are handled – and if and when they eventually reach trial - will be watched meticulously by the media, bearing in mind that the judicial system itself is perceived by many to be very corrupt. The statute of limitation for corruption offences is 15 years, which is just as well because court processes are often woefully slow.

Front-page news coverage of the Sócrates and Golden Visa cases came hard on the heels of sensational allegations against FIFA officials awarding the staging of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, violent outrage over government corruption in Mexico and shenanigans in China that have resulted in more than 13,000 officials being found guilty of corruption and bribery in the first nine months of this year alone.

So what’s new? Over the years, leaders of all stripes - dictators and pillars of democracy alike - have been unable to resist the temptation to abuse their power for personal gain.

Among the worst in modern history was the president of Zaire from 1965 to 1997, Mobutu Sese Seko. He embezzled somewhere between $5 billion and $15 billion. In addition to chartering supersonic Concorde aircraft for shopping trips to Paris, Mobutu and his family, together with an army of bodyguards, used to enjoy visits to his holiday mansion in the Algarve.

The wise man who said, “Corrupt politicians make the other ten percent look bad” was Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and then secretary of state to Richard Nixon who presided over arguably one of the most corrupt administrations in the history of the United States.

The American author John Steinbeck was of the opinion that “power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts…perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”

Mobutu feared being toppled by a military coup and being thrown out of his homeland, which is what happened.  

Richard Nixon’s undoing was his desperate cover-up manoeuvring, fuelled by fear of being exposed by his many political enemies for the 1972 Watergate break-in.

While José Sócrates has little else in common with these two mega-rogues, he must have known that with the worsening of the economic crisis in 2011 an ignominious fall from power was inevitable.

Perhaps the moral of the story lies with a saying attributed to the former Socialist prime minister’s namesake, the classical Greek philosopher Socrates: “He is richest who is content with the least...”

Re-food ramps up its no-hunger effort

With the approach of Christmas comes the prospect of feasting on roast turkey and traditional Portuguese favourites such as marzipan cakes and bolo del rei. Sadly, not for everyone.

There are many people in cities, towns and villages across this country living in poverty, dependent on handouts from food banks and soup kitchens. The full extent of the problem is unclear, but it was probably greater this year than last and it may be worse again in 2015.

Only a few generations ago, food in Portugal was homegrown, seasonally plentiful and cherished for its wholesomeness.

With population growth and urban expansion, foodstuffs have become processed commodities, mass-produced and transported across continents for sale in supermarkets in vast quantities.

Abundance has given rise to immense wastage.

Amid today’s economic inequality and severe austerity, extravagance and gluttony co-exist with poverty and hunger. 

Since the founding of the world’s first food bank in Arizona in 1967, food collection and distribution systems for the hungry have been set up all over North America and in other developed countries around the globe.

The need for such systems increased in Portugal and throughout Europe with the global credit crunch in 2007-2008. It accelerated as the economic crisis developed from 2010.

Co-ordinating the collection of food from a wide range of suppliers and distributing it fairly to all ages of needy people all over the country became a complex task for members of the Portuguese Federation of Food Banks.

Unfortunately there will always be spongers keen to take advantage of anything going for free, and scroungers who see benefits or assistance as a way of life. But a great many people genuinely living in poverty through no real fault of their own feel cloaked in shame.

The prevalence of both waste and hunger moved American altruist Hunter Halder to found his so-called Re-food project in 2011 in Lisbon where he has been living for 23 years.

His idea was to complement national food bank services, as well as private charities running soup kitchens within or outside the food bank system.

Re-food’s somewhat different approach was to organise neighbourhood teams of unpaid volunteers to collect unused food from a variety of retail and catering outlets, and to repackage and deliver it to the homes of those in need.

The formula was designed to be replicated in neighbourhoods throughout the capital and eventually throughout the country.

In May of this year, when we last reported on this, most of Lisbon’s 24 parishes had Re-Food teams in action or being formed. The system had been introduced to Oporto and plans had been ‘seeded’ in the Algarve.

Halder updated us this week saying that the Re-food project was now growing exponentially and that the 1st Annual Re-food National Encounter meeting will be held on 8th December at the ISCTE-IUL campus in central Lisbon.

Around 500 senior volunteers from all over the country will gather to absorb lessons from the original Re-Food cells established in Lisbon and prepare for setting up more elsewhere.  

Thirty-three teams of volunteers have already been formed or are progressing towards full operational status. They include groups in Algoz-Tunes, Albufeira, Almancil, Quarteira and most recently Faro.

Also attending the December 8 meeting will be representatives of more than 40‘pioneer’ groups hoping to introduce Re-food in their home areas in 2015.

“Our accelerated growth will bring the benefits of the project to many more people in many more communities,” said Halder.

“At the same time we realise that our growth cannot be only quantitative. We understand that we must also grow qualitatively to insure that we always deliver the best possible service to insure that Re-food is properly replicated in each new community.”

The costs of holding the national meeting are being kept to a minimum with support from ISCTE-IUL, which has drastically reduced their fees for the use of their premises. Several major hotel groups are going to offer rooms to defer the costs of those travelling from afar. Some of the project’s food source partners will deliver lunch at no cost.

Concurrent to the meeting, Re-food is launching a central office dedicated to managing communication and information, assembling and training teams and delivering the tools and know-how necessary to enable others to replicate operations in their own communities.

On whether food wastage in Portugal is being brought under control, Halder was circumspect, but optimistic.

“There is clearly an emerging consciousness that good food is indeed precious and I suspect that all food service enterprises will very quickly re-align their practices to help stop unnecessary food waste - to burnish their public image if for no other reason.

 “I would suggest that we are at a tipping point and food waste will be reduced on multiple fronts due to the changing consciousness - and this will bolster efforts to fight hunger.”

The great drugs debate is on a high

For those of us without the benefit of deeper understanding through some form of mind-enhancing substance, it is hard to get the head around all the latest talk about drug control. But let’s try.

Broadly speaking it is all about the prohibition, decriminalisation or legalisation of drugs such as cannabis, heroin and cocaine.

Thirteen years ago, Portugal pioneered the decriminalisation route. It is not without its critics, but it has been generally acclaimed a success.

Just to get it straight, Portugal did not legalise, it decriminalised drug use.

This meant a switch from jailing to treating. Using any illegal drug came to be regarded as an issue for the health authorities rather than the justice department.

While drug use is no longer a criminal offence in Portugal, trafficking and dealing still are - and they consumes a lot of police and court time.

A major new study commissioned by the British Home Office included a comparison between the UK’s conventional efforts to control users and Portugal’s decriminalised approach.

It concluded, inter alia, that the tough punishments dished out in the UK do nothing to dissuade people from using drugs.

The Home Office report also stated: ‘‘It is clear that there has not been a lasting and significant increase in drug use in Portugal since 2001.”

The study’s findings were welcomed by the UK coalition government’s Liberal Democrats who are in favour of reform. The Conservatives were not impressed. A spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron said: “We have no intention of decriminalising drugs.”

Kathy Gyngell, a research fellow for a right-leaning British think tank, commented: “First the great Portuguese drug decriminalisation fallacy was fostered; now a British liberalisation myth has been strapped on the back of it by a ruthless and conscienceless pro-drugs lobby.”

Harsh words, but then acrimony and recriminations are normal on the highly contentious subject of drug control.

The subject is hazy and much misunderstood because it is complex. It evokes strong emotions, especially among parents. Statistics do not always tell the whole story and can be slanted or used selectively to support squiffy ideas on one side or the other.

Pope Francis told delegates attending a drug conference in Rome that attempts to legalise recreational drugs “are not only highly questionable from a legislative standpoint, but fail to produce the desired effects.”

Anti-prohibitionists point to the irony in Britain where children find it easy to get hold of illegal marijuana but cannot buy legally regulated alcohol until they are 18.

Reform campaigners claim that far from providing the best protection against drug abuse, locking up ‘soft’ drug users is likely to push them into ‘hard’ drugs. What they need – and what they get in Portugal – is counselling.

Whatever one thinks of decriminalisation, Portugal has prompted other countries to take note. While Britain and countries such as France and Sweden are sticking to their guns in the ‘war on drugs,’ Holland, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and Germany have all steered away from strict prohibition.

Last December, Uruguay became the first country to make it legal to grow, consume and sell cannabis. This summer Jamaica announced it would decriminalise the possession of small amounts of ‘ganja’ as cannabis is known there.

Washington and Colorado in the US are the first states to permit the recreational use of cannabis despite a continuing federal ban. Florida, Oregon and Alaska could be next in line. Californians are expected to approve legalisation of marijuana when the matter is put to the vote there in 2016.

These developments seem to be building towards a fundamental global shift in attitude, guided not only by social concerns but also by also hard economic realities.

“Criminalising users of heroin, cocaine and cannabis has handed global criminal gangs and terrorists a market worth at least $300 billion a year,” says Baroness Meacher, leader of Britain’s All Party Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy Reform.

All eyes will now be on Uruguay and the states of Washington and Colorado to see if the legalisation of cannabis, from cultivation to retail outlets, puts the illegal dealers there out of business.

If cannabis follows the pattern of the wine and spirits industry, trade will be taken from the criminals and placed in the hands of law-abiding business people who, in the words of the Economist, “pay their taxes and obey rules on where, when and to whom they can sell their products. Money saved on policing weed can be spent on chasing real criminals, or on treatment for addicts.”

In time,  Portugal may consider it wise to cut off the flow of money to the crooks by moving from decriminalising drug use to legalising it in some qualified way.

The next opportunity for making real progress on a globally coordinated alternative to the hugely costly and hopelessly failing ‘war on drugs’ will come in 2016 at a United Nations General Assembly Special Sessions gathering in New York.

The last such summit was in 2009. The next was scheduled for 2019 but has been brought forward, so there is more than a hint of urgency in seeking some pragmatic form of global ‘peace.’