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Talk to people addicted to street drugs in Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, and you hear confusion and dismay over the carnage of overdose deaths taking place an ocean away in the U.S.

Ana Batista, a soft-spoken woman in her 50s who’s been addicted to heroin for years, said she hasn’t lost a single friend or family member to a fatal overdose.

“No, no, no,” she said, speaking at a safe drug consumption clinic, where she had come to inject under the supervision of nurses and counselors.

Liliana Santos, 41, a woman with a sad weathered face who had come to the clinic to smoke heroin, voiced similar bafflement.

Had she lost friends or family? “No.” Had she overdosed herself? She shook her head: “No, no.”

The contrast is striking. In the U.S., drug deaths are shatteringly common, killing roughly 112,000 people a year. In Portugal, weeks sometimes go by in the entire country without a single fatal overdose.

Portugal has roughly the same population as the state of New Jersey. But while New Jersey alone sees nearly 3,000 fatal drug overdoses a year, Portugal averages around 80.

“The statistics really speak for themselves,” said Miguel Moniz, an anthropologist at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, who studies addiction policy in the U.S. and Portugal.

An opioid crisis and a pivot toward healing

What’s different in Portugal? In the late 1990s, the country faced an explosion of heroin use. The drug was causing roughly 350 overdose deaths a year and sparked a wave of HIV/AIDS and other diseases linked to dirty needles.

Portugal’s leaders responded by pivoting away from the U.S. drug war model, which prioritized narcotics seizures, arrests and lengthy prison sentences for drug offenders.

Instead, Portugal focused scarce public dollars on health care, drug treatment, job training and housing. The system, integrated into the country’s taxpayer-funded national health care system, is free and relatively easy to navigate.

“Someone who has problematic drug use isn’t someone who is a criminal or someone who has a moral failing,” Moniz said, describing Portugal’s official view of addiction.

“They’re someone who has a health problem, a physical or a mental health problem,” he said. “That’s a tremendous societal shift.”

Many U.S. drug policy experts who’ve studied the Portugal model say it’s clear parts of it worked far better than the tough-on-crime philosophy embraced by U.S.

“I think they showed that when you make [addiction treatment] services extremely available to people who are struggling with problems of drugs, you get a lot of good outcomes,” said Dr. Keith Humphreys, an addiction expert at Stanford University.

“The police is always our friend”

There’s one other big difference. Beginning in 2001, Portugal’s national addiction strategy decriminalized personal drug use and reinvented the role of police.

Cops still work aggressively to break up major drug gangs and arrest people committing drug-related crimes like theft. They also disrupt open-air drug markets like the ones that have emerged in some U.S. cities.

But when street cops in Portugal encounter people using small, personal-use amounts of drugs, there’s no arrest. Instead, police schedule meetings for drug users with teams of counselors.

While these sessions aren’t compulsory, police are trained in strategies designed to encourage people to attend.

“In the beginning, most policemen were very, very skeptical about this policy,” said Artur Vaz, who leads Portugal’s national police unit focused on drug trafficking.

In the U.S., this role for law enforcement, serving as a bridge to social service programs, has faced a backlash and is often seen as ineffectual.

In Oregon, for example, where small amounts of drugs were decriminalized in 2020, police regularly hand out information cards referring people to a drug counseling hotline. Court data shows drug users rarely call.

In Portugal, by contrast, government data shows roughly 90% of people referred to drug counseling sessions by police do turn up, at least for an initial session.

“Most [Portuguese] police have come to believe this is a balanced approach,” Vaz said. “People who consume drugs should be treated by the health system, not the criminal system.”

As a consequence, people living with addiction face far less stigma, rarely serve jail or prison time, and don’t live with criminal records.

Ronnie Duchandre, who is addicted to alcohol and hashish and sometimes smokes crack cocaine on the streets of Lisbon, told NPR he views police as helpful.

“The police is always our friend, as long as you speak with them properly,” Duchandre said. With support from Portugal’s system, he predicted that he would recover from his drug use.

“It’s not in one day that we reach the bottom,” he said. “We can also go up and it’s the same process, slowly up and up.”

Dr. João Goulão, Portugal’s national drug czar, said street cops have emerged as a vital link between the most vulnerable drug users, like Duchandre, and opportunities for treatment.

“Through the intervention of police, this is a unique opportunity to meet face-to-face with people we otherwise would not see,” he said.

Portugal’s formula: less stigma, fewer penalties, access to care

Police referrals are only one of many pathways to drug treatment in Portugal.

“Decriminalizing drug use is a good step,” Goulão said. “The more you have other kinds of responses available, the better.”

Experts here say people who use drugs are constantly nudged toward health care and addiction treatment, including methadone programs and housing.

The results are striking. Over the last 20 years, Portugal cut drug deaths by 80% and reduced the number of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis cases in half.

During that same period, U.S. drug deaths exploded by more than 500%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Researchers predict unless America somehow changes course, the overdose crisis will kill a total of 2.2 million people in the U.S. by the end of this decade.

Could elements of Portugal’s system save lives in the U.S.?

A debate is underway in the U.S. over whether elements of Portugal’s system could save lives here.

“If we stopped arrests and did nothing else, that’s a positive intervention because of the well-documented harms of incarceration [on people with addiction],” said Morgan Godvin, a former heroin user who now studies drug policy in Portland, Ore.

A growing number of cities and states around the U.S. have begun to de-emphasize drug war-era policies, shifting away from drug arrests and funding more treatment.

California voters approved Proposition 14 a decade ago, reducing drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor. In 2020, Oregon voters decriminalized personal-use amounts of drugs and provided more funding for health care and counseling.

Advocates of those changes hoped they would quickly reduce drug deaths and serve as a model for the rest of the U.S., but implementation has been rocky, and in many places fatal overdoses have risen.

Critics say drugs were fully or partially decriminalized before other social programs, like the ones in Portugal, were in place and widely available to pick up the slack.

“We still suck at access to voluntary treatment,” Godvin acknowledged, speaking of drug policy reforms in Oregon. “We need a vast voluntary system, so that people can engage with treatment when they want it.”

A tidal wave of U.S. drug deaths and a backlash against programs designed to help them

Drug policy experts say these relatively new experiments have been crippled by a lack of funding, by strict U.S. drug laws that make some harm reduction measures illegal, and by this country’s complicated, costly and often poorly regulated addiction treatment system.

The spread of deadly fentanyl and a national surge in homelessness have also led to a spike in highly visible drug use, sparking a backlash among many voters and politicians who want streets, neighborhoods and parks cleaned up quickly.

There are now efforts underway to recriminalize drugs, and toughen law enforcement’s response, in California and Oregon.

Humphreys, at Stanford University, says he still supports dramatically expanding access to addiction care, similar to Portugal’s model.

But he doesn’t support decriminalization and believes police and criminal courts in the U.S. will need to play a more aggressive role forcing people with severe addiction off the streets and into treatment.

“They don’t have relationships, they’re isolated, so if there’s no law [enforcement] pressure, there’s no pressure at all,” he said.

Miguel Moniz, the anthropologist at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, disagrees. He says the data shows Portugal’s approach, combining decriminalization and health care, is more humane and more successful.

People in Portugal are now 45 times less likely to die from drug overdoses, compared with people in the U.S. — and street crime in cities like Lisbon has dropped.

“There’s an impression in the U.S. that if you decriminalize drugs, it’s a Wild West where everyone uses drugs,” Moniz said. “That hasn’t been the case in Portugal.”

But as the death toll from the U.S. overdose crisis mounts, Moniz voiced skepticism that American policymakers will have the political will or patience to pivot to a focus on health care and social services.

“There’s a different political environment in the U.S,” Moniz said. “The way health care is funded is completely different. The role of police in American society is different. So to talk about the Portuguese experience [being adopted in the U.S.] is complicated.”

— Tilda Wilson, an NPR Kroc Fellow, contributed field reporting. Inês Pereira Rodrigues provided translations.

U.S. regulators and nine state attorneys general are suing to stop the $24.6 billion merger of Kroger and Albertsons, the country’s two largest supermarket chains.

The companies have presented the deal as existential to surviving in the grocery business today. But the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Oregon on Monday, says it’s anticompetitive.

The Federal Trade Commission argues that Kroger’s purchase of its biggest grocery-store rival would form a colossus that would lead to higher prices, lower-quality products and services, and “eliminate fierce competition” for both shoppers and workers.

The companies have argued that together they could better face stiffening competition from Amazon, Walmart, Costco and even dollar stores. In fact, Kroger on Monday argued the FTC’s rejection of the merger would lead to higher food prices and fewer grocery stores.

“This decision only strengthens larger, non-unionized retailers like Walmart, Costco and Amazon by allowing them to further increase their overwhelming and growing dominance of the grocery industry,” a Kroger spokesperson said in a statement.

Kroger and Albertsons had cushioned their pitch to regulators with a plan to sell off up to 650 stores in areas of the country where they overlap. But the FTC says the proposed sale of stores is inadequate and “falls far short of mitigating the lost competition between Kroger and Albertsons.”

In the months leading up to the agency’s decision, some supermarket employees, state officials and lawmakers had argued the merger would reduce options for customers and employees, farmers and food producers. Unions — the Teamsters and the United Food and Commercial Workers International — have expressed concerns about the tie-up.

Ohio-based Kroger is the biggest U.S. supermarket operator with more than 2,700 locations; its stores include Ralphs, Harris Teeter, Fred Meyer and King Soopers. Idaho-based Albertsons is the second-largest chain with nearly 2,300 stores, including Safeway and Vons. Together, the two employ some 720,000 people across 48 states and overlap particularly in the West.

The FTC, which had reviewed the deal for more than a year, says in a press release that an executive from one of the two chains “reacted candidly” to the proposed merger by saying: “You are basically creating a monopoly in grocery with the merger.”

Attorney generals of Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming are joining the FTC in its lawsuit to block the deal.

The attorneys general of Washington and Colorado already have filed their own lawsuits to stop Kroger from buying Albertsons. But the companies’ plan recently won support of one local union chapter — representing workers in Oregon, Idaho and Washington — which argued that Albertsons’ owner would likely sell the company anyway, potentially to a worse outcome.

Kroger and Albertsons, trying to convince regulators that the merger wouldn’t reduce local competition, had agreed to sell hundreds of stores in overlapping markets to C&S Wholesale Grocers, a supply company that runs some Piggly Wiggly supermarkets.

C&S agreed to buy retail locations as well as some private brands, distribution centers and offices. The company said it was “committed to retaining” the stores’ existing workers, promising to recognize the union workforce and keep all collective bargaining agreements.

In recent years, many antitrust experts — including those now at the FTC — have questioned the effectiveness of divestitures as a path to approve mergers.

“C&S would face significant obstacles stitching together the various parts and pieces from Kroger and Albertsons into a functioning business—let alone a successful competitor against a combined Kroger and Albertsons,” the FTC says in its release.

When Albertsons itself merged with Safeway in 2015, for example, the FTC required it to sell off 168 stores as part of the deal. Within months, one of its buyers filed for bankruptcy protection and Albertsons repurchased 33 of those stores on the cheap.

A federal appeals court has lifted a moratorium on new coal leasing on federal land that dates back to the Obama administration.

A three judge panel in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday tossed the moratorium saying it was now moot. It’s the latest decision in a series of legal back-and-forths that date back to 2016 when then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell moved to halt all new coal leasing on federal land as part of a strategy to address climate change.

President Trump’s Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke ended the Obama moratorium, a move that was challenged by environmental groups and tribes. A court then reinstated the ban on new leases in 2022.

Wednesday’s latest ruling tossing that out appears to be largely on a technicality. The judges noted that the original challenge was to a Trump-era policy that is no longer in place as President Biden’s Interior Secretary Deb Haaland had revoked it already.

Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association called the ruling a victory. “Important projects can once again advance and support the production of affordable, reliable power to the grid, while creating jobs and economic development,” Nolan said in a written statement.

Even as demand for coal has slumped nationwide, mining companies have pushed federal land managers to open up more land for exploration particularly in the western United States, citing its location as a possible continued export market to countries such as China.

It’s not yet clear how President Biden will respond to Wednesday’s ruling or how soon new leasing could resume on federal public land.

Environmentalists and tribes are pressing the Biden administration to intervene again and launch a new federal review of the coal leasing program.

In a statement, William Walksalong of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in the coal-rich Powder River Basin in Montana said the administration needs to “step up” and live up to its promises to protect the climate.

“We will fight tirelessly to protect our reservation and its air and waters and the Cheyenne way of life,” Walksalong said.

NASA is looking for four people to join its yearlong mission in a Mars simulator, as the agency continues research for human exploration of the planet.

The agency is already halfway through the first of three of its planned CHAPEA, or Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, missions. As the agency continues to collect data from it, applications are live for its next four-person cohort to live and work from a 3D-printed, 1,700-square-foot facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Starting in spring 2025, participants will undergo some of the trials and tribulations of life on the Red Planet, “including resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and other environmental stressors,” NASA said.

Crew members will additionally have to do spacewalks, operate robots, exercise, grow crops and maintain the facility, known as the Mars Dune Alpha.

Details about pay will be discussed during the screening process, NASA said.

To qualify, applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents, be between 30 and 55 years old, nonsmokers and speak English proficiently. Additionally, the agency is primarily looking for those with experience in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, known as STEM.

You can have at least four years of professional STEM experience, but must also either have a bachelor’s degree in STEM or have completed military officer training. If you have a master’s degree in STEM, you must have at least two years of professional STEM experience or at least 1,000 pilot hours. You may also be considered if you’ve gotten through two years of a STEM doctoral program.

Applicants who have a medical degree or have done a test pilot program also have a chance.

To apply, click here. The deadline is April 2.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a major case that could reshape how cities manage homelessness. The legal issue is whether they can fine or arrest people for sleeping outside if there’s no shelter available. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has deemed this cruel and unusual punishment, and this case is a pivotal challenge to that ruling.

The high court declined to take up a similar case in 2019. But since then, homelessness rates have climbed relentlessly. Street encampments have grown larger and have expanded to new places, igniting intense backlash from residents and businesses. Homelessness and the lack of affordable housing that’s helping to drive it have become key issues for many voters.

The case, Grants Pass v. Johnson, could have dramatic implications for the record number of people living in tents and cars across the United States.

An Oregon town banned camping and the use of sleeping bags and stoves on public property

In the small city of Grants Pass, Oregon, homeless people say the city broke the law when it aggressively tried to push them out over the past decade. To discourage people from sleeping in public spaces, the city banned the use of stoves and sleeping bags or other bedding. But during several years when she had lost housing, Helen Cruz says she needed to live in city parks because they’re close to the jobs she had cleaning houses.

“We’re not out there because we want to be,” she says. “We don’t have a choice. There’s no place to go.”

Grants Pass has no homeless shelter that’s open to everyone. A religious mission takes in a few who agree to attend services. That left Cruz racking up thousands of dollars in fines, which she remains unable to pay.

“And I keep getting mail from Josephine County court saying, ‘You owe this. If you don’t pay this, it’s going to collections,'” she says, “which has destroyed my credit.”

A lawsuit originally filed in 2018 on behalf of homeless people in Grants Pass said the situation there was part of a larger crisis, as homelessness rates around the U.S. were high and growing. It accused the city of trying to “punish people based on their status of being involuntarily homeless.” The 9th Circuit agreed, saying the city could not ban people from sleeping outside with “rudimentary protection from the elements” when there was nowhere else for them to go.

The same appeals court also sided with homeless people in a landmark 2018 case out of Boise, Idaho, which the Supreme Court later declined to take up.

Critics say the Grants Pass ruling is a major expansion over the Boise one, since it forbids not just criminal penalties but civil ones. Advocates for homeless people don’t see much difference, since some in Grants Pass who couldn’t pay their fines were eventually jailed.

Grants Pass petitioned the Supreme Court. And its appeal has drawn support from dozens of local and state officials across the West and elsewhere who urged the justices to take this case. Among those filing such friend-of-the-court briefs are Republican-led states like Idaho, Montana and Nebraska and Democratic-led cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, plus a separate brief from California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Officials say the law has paralyzed their efforts to manage a public safety crisis

States and cities contend these rulings have contributed to the growth of tent encampments.

“These decisions are legally wrong and have tied the hands of local governments as they work to address the urgent homelessness crisis,” Theane Evangelis, the attorney representing Grants Pass, said in a statement. “The tragedy is that these decisions are actually harming the very people they purport to protect.”

Evangelis and others say sprawling tent camps pose a threat to public health and safety. Those living in them often face theft or assault and are at risk of being hit by passing vehicles. And they note that encampments have led to fires, disease, environmental hazards and high numbers of people overdosing on drugs and dying on public streets.

“It’s just gone too far,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said last year at a Politico event in Sacramento. “People’s lives are at risk. It’s unacceptable what’s happening on the streets and sidewalks. Compassion is not stepping over people on the streets.”

Critics also say the 9th Circuit’s rulings are ambiguous and have been interpreted too broadly, making them unworkable in practice.

“We need to have clarity,” says Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison, who wrote a legal brief on behalf of more than a dozen other cities plus the National League of Cities.

For example, what exactly constitutes adequate shelter? And what about when a bed is open, but someone refuses to go? Local officials say that this happens a lot, and some acknowledge that people might have good reasons to not want to go to a shelter. Yet Davison says court rulings essentially require cities to build enough shelter for every person without housing, something many places can’t possibly afford.

They also argue that homelessness is a complex problem that requires balancing competing interests, something local officials are better equipped to do than the courts.

“We are trying to show there’s respect for the public areas that we all need to have,” Davison says. “And we care for people, and we’re engaging and being involved in the long-term solution for them.”

Advocates say punishing homeless people won’t solve the problem

Attorneys and advocates for the homeless plaintiffs argue that the 9th Circuit rulings are far narrower and less restrictive than cities claim.

“It’s interesting to me that the people in power have thrown up their hands and said, ‘There’s nothing we can do, and the only solution we can think of is to arrest people,'” says Jesse Rabinowitz of the National Homelessness Law Center. “That’s simply not true.”

He and others say the rulings do allow cities to regulate encampments. They can limit the time and place for them, ban the use of tents, even clear them out. And plenty of cities do that, though they often face lawsuits over the details of what’s allowed.

Grants Pass did what’s not allowed, which is ban camps everywhere all the time, says Ed Johnson of the Oregon Law Center, which represents those suing the city. He says that would basically make it illegal for people to exist.

“It’s sort of the bare minimum in what a just society should expect, is that you’re not going to punish someone for something they have no ability to control,” he says.

The reason they can’t control being homeless, Johnson says, is because Grants Pass — like so many cities around the U.S. — has a severe housing shortage and unaffordable rents. He says that cities are blaming the courts for decades of failed housing policies and that fining and jailing people only makes the problem worse.

“When we criminalize people, we know it impacts their ability to get a job,” says Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “It impacts their ability to get housing in the long run if they have a criminal record.”

Some cities that side with Grants Pass say they have invested heavily to create more affordable housing, even as homelessness rates keep going up. That’s a long-term challenge they’ll still face, whatever the Supreme Court decides.

In 2020, the United States experienced one of its most dangerous years in decades.

The number of murders across the country surged by nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020, according to FBI statistics. The overall violent crime rate, which includes murder, assault, robbery and rape, inched up around 5% in the same period.

But in 2023, crime in America looked very different.

“At some point in 2022 — at the end of 2022 or through 2023 — there was just a tipping point where violence started to fall and it just continued to fall,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst and co-founder of AH Datalytics.

In cities big and small, from both coasts, violence has dropped.

“The national picture shows that murder is falling. We have data from over 200 cities showing a 12.2% decline … in 2023 relative to 2022,” Asher said, citing his own analysis of public data. He found instances of rape, robbery and aggravated assault were all down too.

Yet when you ask people about crime in the country, the perception is it’s getting a lot worse.

A Gallup poll released in November found 77% of Americans believed there was more crime in the country than the year before. And 63% felt there was either a “very” or “extremely” serious crime problem — the highest in the poll’s history going back to 2000.

So what’s going on?

What the cities are seeing

What you see depends a lot on what you’re looking at, according to Asher.

“There’s never been a news story that said, ‘There were no robberies yesterday, nobody really shoplifted at Walgreens,'” he said.

“Especially with murder, there’s no doubt that it is falling at [a] really fast pace right now. And the only way that I find to discuss it with people is to talk about what the data says.”

There are some outliers to this trend — murder rates are up in Washington, D.C., Memphis and Seattle, for example — and some nonviolent crimes like car theft are up in certain cities. But the national trend on violence is clear.

NPR spoke to three local reporters — from Baltimore, San Francisco and Minneapolis — to better understand what is happening in their communities.

“We’ve seen two years now of crime incrementally going down, which I think is enough to say there’s a positive trend there,” said Andy Mannix, a crime and policing reporter for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.

Rachel Swan, a breaking news and enterprise reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, says there are “two really visible crises” in the downtown area: homelessness and open-air drug use.

“And honestly, people conflate that with crime, with street safety,” she said. “One thing I’m starting to learn in reporting on public safety is that you can put numbers in front of people all day, and numbers just don’t speak to people the way narrative does.”

In Baltimore — a city that’s battled a perception of being dangerous — it’s a similar story.

Lee Sanderlin is an enterprise reporter with The Baltimore Banner and says there are pockets of violent crime — but that’s not the case for the entire city.

“That’s a battle that the city’s leaders have had to fight with certain media outlets, with residents,” Sanderlin said. “People who don’t live in Baltimore, who live out in Baltimore County or neighboring counties, they certainly have a perception.”

Unraveling the reasons

Asher, the crime analyst, says there is no one reason why violent crime is going down.

“It’s a really hard question to answer, and I always caveat my answer with [saying that] criminologists still aren’t sure why violent crime went down in the ’90s,” he said. “We can kind of point to what some of the ingredients probably are even if we can’t take the cake and tell you what the exact recipe is.”

For cities like San Francisco, Baltimore and Minneapolis, there may be different factors at play. And in some instances, it comes as the number of police officers declines too.

Baltimore police are chronically short of their recruitment goal, and as of last September had more than 750 vacant positions, according to a state audit report.

“Our new police commissioner has been pretty open about the fact … that while they want to hire more officers, they have to do the job with the people they have,” Sanderlin said.

In Minneapolis, police staffing has plummeted. According to the Star Tribune, there are about 560 active officers — down from nearly 900 in 2019. Mannix said the 2020 police killing of George Floyd resulted in an unprecedented exodus from the department.

He said that the juxtaposition of crime going down at the same time as police numbers dropped was “very confusing to a lot of people.”

“The reality is there’s a lot of things that factor into crime,” he said. “It’s not just how many police there are. That’s definitely one variable.”

In Minneapolis, the city is putting more financial resources into nontraditional policing initiatives. The Department of Neighborhood Safety, which addresses violence through a public health lens, received $22 million in the 2024 budget.

In San Francisco, police there say they’ve been better at making arrests.

Meanwhile, Sanderlin said Baltimore voted for a new prosecutor who vowed to be tough on crime; the police say they are targeting violent hotspots; and the mayor’s office is connecting would-be offenders with housing assistance and employment.

“Put all of that in the blender with a generally better economy, more people are sort of getting back to a pre-pandemic way of life, and that probably has something to do with it,” Sanderlin said.

But changing the view of crime is about playing the long game, he added.

“Crime affects people very personally. The only way to get people to change their perceptions on a macro scale is for progress to continue.”