The northern city of Porto, like Portland, is struggling with crime and blight, says The Washington Post.
July 08, 2023 at 5:44 am PDT
During their 2020 campaign, proponents of Measure 110, the referendum that decriminalized small amounts of heroin, cocaine and other drugs, often pointed to Portugal as a success story when it came to ending the long, destructive war on drugs.
Now, many civic leaders in Portugal are having second thoughts, The Washington Post reports.
The writers, Anthony Faiola and Catarina Fernandes Martins, open the story on the streets of Porto, a (really pretty) city of 232,000 in Northwest Portugal. There are 1.7 million people in the Porto metropolitan area (compared with 2.5 million in Portland), making it Portugal’s second-largest city after Lisbon.