Portugal Counted 14,476 People Without a Home at the End of 2024, and the Charity Working Lisbon's Streets Would Bring Back the 1990s Drug Playbook

Comunidade Vida e Paz, the Lisbon charity that has worked the capital's streets for four decades, agrees with the police that Portugal needs to spend more on people addicted to drugs. It does not think spending alone is the answer. In a written reply to the Lusa news agency, its president Horácio Félix said that "naturally more investment is always necessary, but in the case of drug dependency we should recover what was done in the 1990s: prevention in schools, combating the sale of these substances, an increase in beds for the treatment of addictions, and targeted employability programmes".

The remark answers something a police commander said last week. Superintendent-chief Luís Elias, who runs the Comando Metropolitano de Lisboa (Lisbon Metropolitan Command) of the PSP, told Lusa that the fight against drug trafficking and consumption "is not only the police's" but also belongs to health and social security, and that hundreds of people addicted to drugs in Lisbon are sleeping rough. He called for street outreach teams to be funded again, saying the investment "at a certain point stopped being such a major priority".

Vida e Paz can put numbers to the part of that it sees. Around 450 people are accompanied on the streets of Lisbon through its "Ir ao Encontro" outreach programme, and a considerable share of them, Félix said, are people whose homelessness is bound up with addiction to psychoactive substances or alcohol. The programme distributes about 190,000 evening meals and provides social, health, employability and documentary support, plus treatment through the charity's own therapeutic communities. With Lisbon city council it also runs a 40-place integrative unit providing food, lodging and laundry.

The National Count

The wider scale comes from the state's own survey. The characterisation survey run under the national homelessness strategy, ENIPSSA, identified 14,476 people in a homeless situation on the Portuguese mainland at 31 December 2024: 9,403 without a roof, meaning living in public space, an emergency shelter or a precarious location, and 5,073 without a house, meaning in temporary accommodation intended for the purpose. That is 1.41 people per thousand residents, with the highest rates in the Alentejo at 4.45 per thousand, the Algarve at 2.55 and the Lisbon metropolitan area at 1.57. All 278 mainland councils answered; 185 recorded the phenomenon, and the Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas hold 42 percent of the total. In 2024, 1,345 people left homelessness for permanent housing.

What "the 1990s" Actually Means

It is worth being precise about the decade Félix is invoking, because Portugal's best-known drug law came after it. Lei 30/2000 made consumption, acquisition and possession of controlled substances for personal use an administrative offence rather than a crime. Under article 2, holding more than the quantity needed for ten days of average individual use is an indication that the purpose may not be consumption; and since Lei 55/2023, where a person shows the quantity was for their own use, the judicial authority must file the case, decline to indict or acquit, and refer them to a dissuasion commission instead.

Those commissions sit one to a district in premises belonging to ICAD, the Instituto para os Comportamentos Aditivos e as Dependências (Institute for Addictive Behaviours and Dependencies), each staffed by lawyers, doctors, psychologists, sociologists and social workers. The law builds that referral machinery in detail. What it does not do is create treatment beds, school prevention programmes or outreach teams, which is precisely the list Vida e Paz has put forward. The charity is not asking for consumption to be criminalised again. It is asking for the services meant to sit behind the law.

That gap has surfaced repeatedly this year. Lisbon's mayor says none of the 200 extra police promised in May have arrived; an August weekend of violence exposed a fake-drug trade the law cannot reach; and on housing, a Lisbon fund lined up 40 million euros to buy flats for homeless people.