![]() ![]() Pereira improvised, calling on institutions and individuals in the community to lend a hand. A student in her 20s who still lived with her parents might have her family involved in her recovery a middle-aged man, estranged from his wife and living on the street, faced different risks and needed a different kind of support. Pereira tackled the growing wave of addiction the only way he knew how: one patient at a time. ![]() When marijuana and then heroin began flooding in, the country was utterly unprepared. Under the old regime, Coca-Cola was banned and owning a cigarette lighter required a licence. When the regime ended abruptly in a military coup in 1974, Portugal was suddenly opened to new markets and influences. The country was closed to the outside world people missed out on the experimentation and mind-expanding culture of the 1960s. Forty years of authoritarian rule under the regime established by António Salazar in 1933 had suppressed education, weakened institutions and lowered the school-leaving age, in a strategy intended to keep the population docile. In truth, there was a lot of ignorance back then. “I got involved,” he said, “only because I was ignorant.” Pereira recalled desperate patients and families beating a path to his door, terrified, bewildered, begging for help. ![]() The rate of HIV infection in Portugal became the highest in the European Union. Headlines in the local press raised the alarm about overdose deaths and rising crime. Overnight, Pereira’s beloved slice of the Algarve coast became one of the drug capitals of Europe: one in every 100 Portuguese was battling a problematic heroin addiction at that time, but the number was even higher in the south. But by the end of the decade, heroin began washing up on Olhão’s shores. ![]() Coastal waters filled fishermen’s nets from the Gulf of Cádiz to Morocco, tourism was growing, and currency flowed throughout the southern Algarve region. The 80s were a prosperous time in Olhão, a fishing town 31 miles west of the Spanish border. ![]()
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