What are fake drugs?

A stray bullet in Baixa this week has put an unlikely trade back in the spotlight, one you might have been offered on Rua Augusta. It's Sunday, 16 August. Thirty degrees. Air quality: 33 (Good). Here's what you need to know.

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WHAT ARE THE "FAKE DRUGS" BEING SOLD ON LISBON'S STREETS?

If you have walked down Rua Augusta on a summer evening, you may have been offered them. A low voice offers hash, coke or weed and shows a small folded packet. What is almost never mentioned is that most of what changes hands is not a drug at all. It is pressed laurel leaves, talcum powder or chalk, sold to tourists at drug prices. The Public Security Police, Portugal's main urban force known as the PSP, has said for years that roughly four in five of these street sales are pressed bay leaves.

The trade is back in the headlines for a grim reason. On Monday 10 August, a Swedish tourist was hit in the abdomen by a stray bullet in Baixa, caught in a dispute between two groups involved in selling these fake products. The shooting, not the powder, is the real danger here, and it has reopened a debate that has run for more than two decades.

At the centre of it is a legal gap. Selling a fake drug is not the crime of drug trafficking in Portugal, because there is no actual narcotic involved. Police have tried to treat it as unlicensed street trading or misleading advertising, but say that has gone nowhere: many sellers are destitute, produce certificates of poverty and simply never pay the fines. The result is a practice everyone can see and almost no one can stop.

Two things happened this week in response. Iniciativa Liberal, the small free-market liberal party, tabled a bill in parliament on Thursday proposing prison terms of up to one year for making, holding or selling legal substances passed off as narcotics for profit. And the PSP, responding to Rua Augusta shopkeepers who complained that officers had thinned out, rejected the idea that Baixa is under-policed, insisting the area gets regular and highly visible patrols, while backing criminalisation to give it a tool it says it lacks. Lisbon's mayor, Carlos Moedas, has come out for both a new law and a more visible police presence, and criticised the court that released the man suspected of the shooting. The city is also planning to extend CCTV into the Baixa Pombalina, with work expected in 2027.

Not everyone thinks a new crime is the answer. Portugal is world-famous for decriminalising drug use in 2001 and treating it as a health matter, and critics argue that a law aimed mostly at impoverished street sellers criminalises poverty rather than fixing anything, while doing little about the actual risk, which this week was a firearm and a turf fight, not a bag of bay leaves. The residents' association Vizinhos em Lisboa, or Neighbours in Lisbon, has campaigned for years for a specific offence and revived a parliamentary petition this week.

For anyone living here, the practical takeaway is simple. If someone offers you drugs on the street in central Lisbon, assume it is fake, overpriced and best ignored since the real risk is the disputes around the trade rather than the product itself. What is new is that parliament now has a bill in front of it that would, for the first time, make the sale a crime.

Bottom line: the "drugs" sold to tourists in Baixa are mostly laurel leaves, the trade is older than many of the people running it, and a shooting has finally forced the question of whether the law should treat it as a crime or leave a twenty-year-old problem alone.

⚡ QUICK HITS

Your diesel is heading back above two euros. The Automóvel Club de Portugal, the country's motoring club, forecasts diesel rising ten cents to €2.068 a litre from the week of 17 August, with petrol up nine cents to €1.977. That puts a fifty-litre diesel tank at about €103, and diesel has now climbed roughly 41 cents since the start of February. Behind it is conflict: since late February the United States and Israel have been at war with Iran, which has kept the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that normally carries about a fifth of the world's oil and gas, largely blocked. Prices have swung ever since, and on Friday President Trump said he intends to declare the strait a United States territory once Iran is defeated, a claim Tehran rejects.

The average wage has gone up, but the headline hides the real number. Figures released on Friday by the national statistics institute, the INE, put average gross monthly pay at €1,835 in the second quarter, up 5.1 percent on the year, though only 1.8 percent once inflation is stripped out. That average is pulled upward by higher earners: base pay averages €1,342, and the median take-home wage, the point where half of workers earn less, was under €1,000 a month in 2024, the latest figure available. For all the recent rises, Portugal's average salary remains among the lowest in the European Union, well below the bloc's average, which is a large part of why pay and the cost of housing still feel so far apart.

Norway's giant savings fund now owns a record slice of Portugal. The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, the largest of its kind in the world, has lifted its holdings in Portuguese shares and bonds to a record 27.3 billion kroner, around €2.4 billion, according to figures reported this week. It is a notable show of confidence from one of the most cautious big investors around, and it lands alongside a run of similar headlines, from record foreign house-buying to rising liveability rankings, all pointing the same way: outside money likes Portugal, whatever residents make of what that does to prices.

Practice Portuguese — The Learning Platform That Actually Teaches the Portuguese You Hear

Most language apps teach Brazilian Portuguese. This one doesn't. Practice Portuguese is 100% European Portuguese, built by Rui (from Portugal) and Joel (from Canada, who moved here over a decade ago and couldn't find a single decent resource for learning the language people actually speak in Lisbon).

The platform covers complete beginner through to advanced (A1 to B2) with a structured path of over 100 units. But the reason it works for expats living here is the content around the lessons: hundreds of audio and video episodes recorded by native Portuguese speakers, with synced translations, filterable by level and topic. Grammar guides written by people who know exactly where English speakers get stuck. A verb conjugation trainer for the moments when you can't remember whether it's "estive" or "estava." Personalised flashcards that adapt to how you're actually performing. And a members forum where you can ask the questions your Portuguese teacher never had the time for.

The whole thing is self-paced, available on web and app, and built by a team that combines native speakers who know the language inside out with learners who remember what it felt like not to.

Special offer for The Lisbon Letter readers: 60% off your first month.

→ Start learning European Portuguese with 60% off

We only partner with businesses we think genuinely help our community. If this is useful to you, or if you know someone still stuck at "bom dia," every click and every share goes a long way to keeping this newsletter free every morning.

💧 SPOT OF THE DAY

THE RETREAT (SANTA MARTA)

Tucked onto the first floor of the Inspira Liberdade Boutique Hotel on Rua de Santa Marta, a short walk up from Avenida da Liberdade, The Retreat is a small, calm spa built around the idea that you warm the body up before anyone touches it. Every treatment starts with time in the hydrotherapy circuit, a jacuzzi, a sauna and a Turkish steam room, and ends in a quiet lounge with tea and something to nibble.

The treatments are tailored rather than off a conveyor belt, with prices on the higher side, from a straightforward personalised relaxation massage to deeper tissue work and facials, with couples and pairs looked after too. Reviewers single out the therapists by name and the unhurried, unplugged feel of the place, where the hour in the water beforehand and the lounge afterwards matter as much as the massage itself. If all you want is the water, the standalone 80-minute hydrotherapy circuit is the gentlest way in.

Worth knowing before you go: it is open to the public, not just hotel guests, every day from 10am to 8pm, access is for over-16s only, and everything is by appointment, so book ahead rather than walk in. A full massage ritual runs two and a half to four hours once the circuit and lounge are counted, so give it a proper slot of the day. On a thirty-degree afternoon, a cool circuit and a dark, quiet room is a fair way to spend a Sunday.

→ See the treatments and find them here ←

Insider tip: the circuit before and the lounge after are built into your booking and the price, so bring your swimsuit and treat the water as part of the main event, not the warm-up.

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