1/5/2024 0 Comments Medicine byword for crackHealth services worker Maria Carmona, drives the van to another area of the city where they hand out fresh foil, needle exchanges and pipes to smoke crack. I smoke cocaine, but not every day.” Years ago, he would be in jail. Hugo’s team carries out regular tests on the addicts they see regularly at their methadone and needle exchange vans, including chest X-rays to check for TB.īut it is the attitude of the addicts and their willingness to help that suggests the Portuguese are on a winner.Ĭrack-smoking Marco, 40, spots a dirty needle in the gutter. Rates of HIV, hepatitis and TB, sky high in the 90s, have also plunged. Proof that this is working comes from the EU’s Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction which shows Portugal has just three fatal overdoses per million in 15 to 64-year-olds. Hugo says: “You would never think of her as having a drug problem by the way she is dressed. Then a neatly dressed middle aged woman joins the queue. A 30-something guy turns up on a mountain bike as another regular turns up in a smart blue office suit.Ī painter and decorator checks in. Married couples turn up in new Audis and Land Rovers, while a Mercedes bus ferries others to this mobile help centre. ![]() ![]() Looking at the diverse backgrounds of those queuing for an opiate-filled plastic cup from Hugo Faria’s team of psychologists, it’s obvious addiction here affects all walks of life. Last week there was a delegation from Norway and in the past Croatia and Ireland have sent officials.Īnti-drug campaigners like Sir Richard Branson have also been welcomed to witness this phenomenon – how to tackle the growing global drugs problem in a way no one ever believed could work. In the UK, that figure is 44.6 per million – 14 times higher.Ī team from the Home Office has been among politicians and health professionals from around the world flocking here. Instead, the number of addicts in Portugal has HALVED with most on treatment programmes.įatal overdoses have dropped to three per million. Critics warned Portugal would become Europe’s drugs capital.īut it didn’t happen. Since July 2001, anyone can possess a gram of heroin, two of cocaine, 25 of marijuana leaves, five of hashish and one of ecstasy without punishment. It began looking at its drugs crisis as a medical rather than a criminal issue. Words We're Watching talks about words we are increasingly seeing in use but that have not yet met our criteria for entry.The Government stopped prosecuting caught Class A users if they could prove their stuff was for personal use. When white people aspire to get points for consciousness, they walk right into the cross hairs between allyship and appropriation. “Woke” feels a little bit like Macklemore rapping in one of his latest tracks about how his whiteness makes his rap music more acceptable to other white people. The broader uses of woke are still very much in flux, and there are some who are woke to the broader implications of woke: ![]() It’s now seeing use as an adjective to refer to places where woke people commune: woke Twitter has very recently taken off as the shorthand for describing social-media activists. Like many other terms from black culture that have been taken into the mainstream, woke is gaining broader uses. Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke. The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action. But stay woke and woke became part of a wider discussion in 2014, immediately following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better. Woke’s transformation into a byword of social awareness likely started decades earlier but began to be more broadly known in 2008, with the release of Erykah Badu’s song “Master Teacher”:Įven when the preacher tell you some liesĮven though you go through struggle and strifeĮverybody knows a black or a white there's creatures in every shape and size It can be hard to trace slang back to its origins since slang’s origins are usually spoken, and it can be particularly difficult to trace a slang word that has its origins in a dialect. 'Woke' is increasingly used as a byword for social awareness.
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