One of Lisbon’s drug consumption rooms was forced to close their smoking room in January due to funding challenges, limiting services available for people smoking crack in the centre of Portugal’s capital.
The Group of Activists in Treatment (GAT), which runs the drug consumption room and delivers other peer-based services across the city, announced on 25 January that part of their Mouraria site would have to close “for an indetermined period”.
While the injecting space remains open, a lack of funding, staff capacity, and increased political and social pressure against its existence has shuttered the safer smoking room, which was mostly used for smoking crack.
Harm reduction in Mouraria
Mouraria, where GAT’s safer smoking space was located, has been the focus of much public scrutiny and attention.
GAT has had a physical space in Mouraria since 2013, providing a community space with various services to people who use drugs, including health interventions, peer support, distribution of sterile syringes and smoking equipment, as well as signposting to social services.
It also included a safer smoking space, which can accommodate about 10 people at a time, is one of the spaces in highest demand. “We have up to 200 people wanting to use it every day”, Luís Mendão, Chairman of GAT, explained to Portuguese journalists.
However, a spike in the demand for this facility, and GAT’s struggles to properly staff and finance the space, has meant that it had to be temporarily closed.
Speaking to TalkingDrugs, Mendão confirmed that the smoking room will remain closed until further notice. “The primary reason [for its closing] is the lack of space and challenges in assuring conditions of safety for those using and the staff given its high demand.”
Concerns with safety – not with migrants
The state of Mouraria’s public safety has been an ongoing concern for its residents for many years. A historical neighbourhood in the heart of Lisbon with roughly 6,000 inhabitants, it is home to a diverse group: sex workers, street-based people using drugs, non-White immigrants and Portuguese locals have lived together for decades. Neighbouring Mouraria is Martim Moniz, one of the most racially and socially diverse neighbourhoods of Lisbon, with over 15,000 residents of non-Portuguese nationalities, including citizens from Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan.
Issues with public drug use, however, have grown since the pandemic, which exacerbated social inequalities in the area. In 2020, a group of Mouraria residents delivered a petition to the Portuguese Ministry of Interior asking for public safety improvements, relating their struggles with frequent robberies, sex work and public drug use.
Much of the public attention on the area has focused on its racial demographics. For the past two years, there have been frequent police operations in the area to identify illegal migrants, businesses and irregular living situations. A large fire in December 2023 uncovered one residence where over 20 migrants lived in a single apartment, highlighting the precarious housing situation for many people who arrive in Lisbon with few economic opportunities to succeed.
Large raids in 2024 and 2025 have consolidated into narratives against immigrants and those living on the streets. This is despite the fact that police operations targeting illegal migrants in Mouraria have often failed to find undocumented migrants.
For local residents, their concerns are with the area’s safety: in an open forum with Lisbon’s mayor last year, the residents of Santa Maria Maior, Mouraria’s parish, spoke of the lack of safety in the area, ample trash, and open drug use in the neighbourhood.
Tensions are only likely to be exacerbated in the area with the closure of GAT’s smoking room. While locals are rightfully concerned with crime and the state of their area, the situation will not be improved by the end of the GAT’s safer smoking services. Left with no private locations to use crack, most people will continue to use in the surrounding streets, in turn aggravating local’s perception of safety. This situation will continue to deteriorate until proper funding is secured for health and social interventions.
Funding sorely needed to prevent more harm
Luís Mendão, the founder of GAT, told TalkingDrugs that the GAT space in Mouraria has never received public funding; however, they were now currently looking to secure public funding to keep the Mouraria space running, and hopefully expand it to meet demand – especially with the smoking room.
“Negotiations with Lisbon City Hall and ICAD [the Portuguese drug agency within the Health Ministry] are underway so we can increase our space to its required standard and with financing to guarantee its management,” he commented.
Magda Ferreira, a peer worker at GAT and member of the Manas (a Lisbon based collective of women and gender-diverse people who use drugs), emphasised that while Mouraria has had a demographic shift since the pandemic, it’s always been an area of drug use and selling. A drug consumption room is sorely needed; without it, health harms from drug use should be expected to rise.
“There will be an increase of public drug use, and that can promote unbalanced behaviours [from those using crack]. Nowadays, crack is very adulterated, and people are really unbalanced. This increase in the visibility of drug use and of disruptive behaviour creates a seriously negative image of drug using communities,” Ferreira told TalkingDrugs.
Blaming people using drugs on the street for the lack of public security in Mouraria is placing guilt on the symptom of an issue, rather than its cause. Without funding for sorely needed health services like safer smoking rooms, the conditions for everyone are only likely to get worse: people using drugs won’t have a safe space for themselves, and locals’ animosity against them for fuelling their perceived insecurity will only continue to grow.
“What we need is more spaces to use in this area,” as Ferreira put it. “Nobody wants to be using on the streets and be treated badly for using. People have the right to dignity.”
