Lisbon’s metropolitan PSP police recently told Lusa News Agency, “Part of the products being sold in downtown Lisbon as hashish is not hashish. It is compressed laurel and does not equate to criminal activity.”
Therefore, the force explained, PSP officers have no legitimacy to make arrests despite acknowledging these activities cause a feeling of insecurity among the local population.
On the condition of anonymity through fear of reprisals, a number of shop owners along Rua Augusta, one of the city’s busiest streets, told Lusa that “it is a problem that has been going on for three or four years.”
They say the bothersome loiterers create “a negative image of the city, which hinders the local economy”, and criticise the fact that the law is not strict enough to reprimand the perpetrators.
The network of “phony drug traffickers” is said to approach everyone and anyone, particularly tourists, and try to sell nuggets of hashish for €70; a price that can be negotiated.
Given that laurel is not considered an illegal substance its possession and sale “does not constitute a crime nor does it allow for the PSP to intervene, as they can with [illegal] drug traffickers”, a police source explained.
When asked whether protests had been voiced by local residents, business-owners or tourists about the activity, the PSP told Lusa that “some complaints” had been lodged, “not about the trafficking of drugs, but the sale of pressed laurel.”
The Lisbon Metropolitan PSP force believes the levels of trafficking in the area are not unusual, nor has there been a rise in drug-pushing.
However, the force acknowledged that illicit goings-on will continue in the area, “and, in a zone of high tourist flows, the activity can be even more profitable.”
Last year the PSP registered 658 cases of drug trafficking in downtown Lisbon and identified 457 people.
In 2013 the force logged 1,003 cases and identified 622 individuals.
The PSP further said the sale of pressed laurel can only be stopped by local councils and ASAE health and safety authorities, through the inspection of peddling licenses, given that it is not illegal.
That police force has reportedly asked for ASAE to consider possible intervention, stressing that the health and safety authority is responsible for overseeing street vendor licenses.
In turn, contacted by Lusa, a source from ASAE explained that it is in fact “councils that are responsible for checking the activity in question”, although ASAE would be able to monitor “the lack of advance notice for the exercise of activity.”
According to the source, “peddling without being given prior notification is a punishable administrative offence”, but there are also doubts as to what name to give to the sale of the likes of pressed laurel.
A spokesperson for Lisbon’s Councillor for Security, Carlos Castro, explained that the sale of pressed laurel on the streets of downtown Lisbon “cannot be called peddling”, and stressed that it is more of a “deceptive sale”, and for that “there is no type of licensing.”
Notwithstanding the difficulties in appointing a monitor for activity, attempts have been made at controlling the problem.
Lisbon Council has, since April, been carrying out a community policing project in the Baixa-Chiado, named ‘Watch the Street’, which is supported by traders to deter illicit activities, including the sale of ‘pseudo drugs’.