TCNJ

31 SPRING 2018 oversees Portugal's drug policy, and the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which is based in Lisbon. They also visit In Moraria, a small drop-in center that hires people using intravenous drugs as outreach workers, tasked with encouraging other users to seek treatment — or at least come in for a clean needle. Gibson's students arrive in Portugal with their own perspectives on drug abuse and its remedies, typically viewed through the prism of the criminal justice system. But year after year, she says, they return home with a new understanding of what really works. "The students leave changed," Gibson says. "They will frequently come in with a lack of under- standing about addiction. They don't recognize the history of people who use drugs. They come in referring to people who use drugs as addicts, and they leave Opening up Dariano tells his story in hopes that people see addiction in a new light. "When the stigma is gone, people posture themselves differently," he says. understanding these are people who struggle with drug use. They understand that the vast majority of drug-addicted people have a substantial history of trauma." Luke Thompson '18, a former social worker now enrolled in the counselor education program, traveled to Portugal with the TCNJ contingent last summer. He says he was struck by how government authorities in the largely Catholic, largely conservative country had gotten cultural buy-in to the drug policy. Walking the streets of Lisbon, Thompson would chat up the locals, inevitably asking for their views on addiction. "It's considered

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