LISBON, Dec 24 (AFP) - Portugal is under pressure to set up heroin injection rooms in its overcrowded prisons, where widespread drug use is leading to rising rates of HIV infection amongst the nation's 14,000 inmates.
Nearly one in two Portuguese prisoners regularly gets high and of those who do, 26.8 percent use injecting drugs like heroin, according to a government report released last month.
More worryingly, the report into the state of the nation's prisons concluded that more than three-quarters of those who use injecting drugs behind bars share their needles, creating the ideal environment for the spread of the HIV virus.
Fully 14 percent of Portuguese prisoners are infected with the HIV virus while 396 prisoners have full-blown AIDS, the report compiled by the office of Portugal's justice ombudsman said.
The prevalence of HIV/AIDS, along with other communicable diseases like hepatitis and tuberculosis, helped give Portugal the highest rate of prisoner deaths in the EU last year.
There were 60 deaths for every 10,000 inmates in Portugal in 2002, compared to just 20 in neighbouring Spain.
To slow the spread of HIV in jails and improve this grim record, the prison report recommended the government set up injection rooms in prisons where inmates would be provided with clean needles and a place to shoot up in a supervised setting.
Similar programs were first set up in Switzerland, amidst much controversy, and have since been put in place in Spain and Germany.
The aim of such programs is to reduce the harm that illegal drugs cause to the users themselves as well as to society as a whole, a philosophy known as "harm reduction".
The recommendation was immediately backed by Portugal's lawyers association as well as by former UN General Assembly president Diogo Freitas do Amaral, who currently chairs a commission looking into prison reform in Portugal.
"There are unique circumstances in prisons which can lead one to adopt a different approach to drugs than that which is adopted in the wider society," he said shortly after the report was published.
But Justice Minister Celeste Cardona, one of three cabinet ministers from the right-wing Popular Party, the junior partner in the centre-right governing coalition, has flatly rejected the proposal.
"With me there will be no experiments in the prison system when it comes to the use or existence of injection rooms," she said.
"There is no experience in this area in the wider society and it is not in prisons, where our caution needs to be greater, that we are going to start having rooms with these characteristics."
Government policy will instead continue to focus on drug addiction treatment programs for prisoners, including the methadone replacement therapy for heroin addicts, the minister said.
To back the continuation of the current policy, the minister has pointed out that between 20 and 30 percent of all prisoners who said they took drugs before they entered jail report their consumption of narcotics had decreased after they were put behind bars.
The head of Portugal's Drugs Institute, a branch of the health ministry dedicated to tackle drug addiction, weighed in on the debate last week, arguing that injection rooms could be effective but only after prisons become less crowded.
"In the area of drug addiction, we can not close the door to anything," Fernando Negrao said in an interview with the Lusa news agency.
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