When I saw the chart I thought, what's wrong with Estonia?
The majority of Estonian population view drug users as someone who deserves to die, because of their poor choices. It's hard to get help or any compassion when you're an IV drug user.
Attempts to create needle exchanges are met with fierce resistance from neighbours. There are methadone programs but it's tiny compared to the amount of fentanyl users.
Up to 7.5 grams cannabis is not an criminal offense and smoking weed is quite popular with the younger generation. However, in Estonia it's not uncommon to hear from police that every weed smoker will surely start using fentanyl. Soft and hard drugs are treated the same in state propaganda, which results in many young people not believing that fentanyl is dangerous: since they were lied about weed, how can they trust warnings about hard drugs?
Estonia has also a huge alcohol problem. I believe many hard drug users started using because they were drunk in the first place. Alcoholism leads to violence at homes, murders, horrible car accidents, risky behaviours like trying hard drugs and having unprotected sex - you see, Estonia has a HIV epidemic as well.
(I'm not saying that it's a bad policy but why is the article focused on pushing that policy?)
Also what I want to see: What about Portugal makes it work? Could you test that assertion against a different country if you made the contextual changes and the change there?
In other words, it's highly likely that Romania didn't "do better" than Portugal, but rather they're doing a very poor job tracking overdoses at all.
The number of drug induced death has decreased over the past 15 years, and it coincide with the adoption of the liberal policy on drugs. That's what makes Portugal an interesting case study.
Why is that?