On September 23, a Thursday, Jorlan Nestlehner Vieira, 35, goes to Hospital Lusíadas, in Lisbon, with severe back pain. It is around 9:45 am and he goes into a urology consultation. After being observed, the doctor asks you to have a CT scan. He goes into the emergency room, does the screening, puts on a bracelet. After analyzing the exam, another doctor tells him: “Jorlan has two radiodense masses in the intestine, about two centimeters in diameter.”
Jorlan Vieira was “desperate” because he has “grandmothers, uncles, aunts and cousins who died of cancer”. “It all fell to me,” he tells Público. What follows is his version of the succession of events that led his lawyer, Carlos Pinto de Abreu, to send a letter to the hospital stating that Jorlan was the victim of insidious suspicion and accusation, “defamed, humiliated and the object of treatment degrading, quite possibly due to prejudice and/or xenophobia”.
The lawyer also says that Jorlan Vieira was the target of unlawful detention, violation of medical confidentiality, abuse of power and police torture out of process by some agents, without any opposition from health professionals. When contacted, Hospital Lusíadas denies everything.
Returning to the story, Jorlan Vieira tells Público that at that time the doctor told him she was going to talk to another doctor on duty to discuss what those “masses” were. However, he asks him: “With that name, Jorlan is not Portuguese, is he?”
Living in Portugal since 2009, of Brazilian and Austrian origin and Portuguese nationality, responsible for two Meo stores and working for eight years at Myphone, Jorlan Vieira was already a patient at Hospital Lusíadas, where he underwent gallbladder treatment. He says: “I can define by tone whether the question about my origin is that of creating empathy. The doctors’ tone of voice already betrayed something.”
More than an hour passes. Another doctor calls him, asks the same questions: what is his origin, where he lives. “He asked if I used drugs, if I was ever unconscious [após desmaio], if they have already forced me to swallow anything, what was the last time I had traveled.” Jorlan Vieira replied that he had not been traveling since 2019.
In the medical report that Público had access to, it is mentioned that a third doctor received information from her colleague that there was a patient at the counter suspected of having ingested illegal substances and that after discussion with the clinical management, the responsible authorities were contacted. He also states that the radiology team did not exclude the raised hypothesis and that, with the agents present, laxative therapy was carried out. In that same document it is written that Jorlan had said that he took two benurons and a brufen (analgesics).
Jorlan Vieira was far from imagining what would follow, according to his account. Two more hours passed. I hadn’t eaten since morning. He complains to the professionals about this, the medical head of the team gives orders to put him on an IV.
They call him: “I go into the room and I have all the doctors, plus two men who have identified themselves as from radiology. On my left side there are two men who identify themselves as police inspectors, but they were not in uniform. They tell me: ‘ We received a complaint from the hospital, you transport illicit substances inside your intestine. What you have could be cocaine acorns.’ At that point I sat down, looked at the doctor’s face.
Incredulous, Jorlan Vieira replies that he has no idea what he has, but that he is absolutely sure it’s not a drug. The doctor evokes a protocol to justify the complaint that requires reporting this type of situation to the authorities. “But report what? What makes them think I have cocaine?” he asks.
It is 6 pm, nine hours after entering the hospital with the back pain that has not gone away. Police officers from the PSP (Public Security Police) arrive in civilian clothes and warn him that “no one leaves until they understand what’s inside”. If you refuse, you would be found guilty.
The doctor informs him: “We have two options, there is a preparation that we give when people are going to undergo an exam that takes some time to work, and there is another medication a little more aggressive, but after a few minutes, the thing happens more quickly.”
Jorlan Vieira replies that he opts for the “quickest solution”. The doctor warns: “The drug is effective but a bit corrosive, if what Jorlan has inside is an acorn of cocaine, he runs the risk of corroding the film that surrounds it and if it breaks, he will overdose.”
Jorlan Vieira says he’s going to drink it: “What I have inside is not an acorn.” The agents give an evasive explanation of the next procedure. “I didn’t know what was to come.”
scrambled stools
They direct him to another room, followed by the plainclothes agents. They order him to take the medicine. They say they are going to get a bedpan and that they can all go to the bathroom. Jorlan Vieira was still receiving the IV, with the catheter in his arm. She felt cramps. “Then I had to go to the bathroom with the policeman behind me, I evacuated in the chamber pot, the policeman put on gloves and moved in front of me.”
The scenario he describes is one of “humiliation”. However, these two policemen went to dinner; they would be replaced by three other agents. The procedure is repeated, cramps/bathroom. But one of them refuses to touch the feces and forces Jorlan Vieira to do so. “I put on my gloves and I’m messing with my feces in front of him… I’m still in this routine, one, two, three bottles…”
There is another shift change, another agent enters. “I had to go through it all in front of six different people.” And this without medical supervision, only with the police. The process started at 7pm and lasted until around 1am. He hadn’t eaten for 15 hours, he felt faint.
However, he informs another doctor that he could no longer drink more water. Performs a second CAT scan, where the radiodense mass image was maintained. “Now only with a colonoscopy,” said the doctor. That’s when Jorlan Vieira objected, “fearing for his physical integrity”. “I’m not taking a sedative like this. I only do it in the presence of a lawyer.”
The agent makes a phone call to someone, and says, “Go on with your life, I just need the doctor’s discharge.”
In the report, the doctor writes that the police called the “commander” who, in turn, said that, having not been proven to take illegal substances, “the police surveillance ceased”. This commander was from the PSP –the position does not exist in the PJ (Judiciary Police)–, but the PJ is the entity responsible for investigating these types of cases. Why was the PSP there and not the PJ? Neither Hospital Lusíadas nor the PSP explained.
At that moment, Jorlan Vieira informs the doctor that he is still in pain; he advises you to have a colonoscopy. When Jorlan Vieira finally leaves at dawn, his car has been towed away.
In shock and recovering from what had happened to him, it is only a week after that Jorlan Vieira decides to have a colonoscopy, but in another hospital. The mass was gone. Possibly it was the two benurons he had taken to soothe the pains, suggests the doctor.
“I felt revolt”, he says. “Literally I was treated like garbage. We are talking about physical and mental integrity, they did something against my body based on the fact that I am a foreigner. I lost a day of work, I am subjected to that because a head decides to look at a CT scan and look at a foreigner and say it sucks.”
More than indemnification, Jorlan Vieira decided to denounce the case so that it would not happen again. “I’m still white, if I keep my mouth shut nobody knows where I’m from. How many people suffer from it and nobody does anything? I feel like I need to do something. If I don’t do anything, how many poor people will go through this?”
In the letter, the lawyer asks: “Is it hospital protocol to violate medical confidentiality? The unfounded denunciation of users to the police authorities before obtaining a precise diagnosis and guaranteeing proper treatment?” He also accuses the hospital of not protecting those who are “sick”: “The focus during all that time was not analyzing the patient’s clinical situation, taking care of their health, employing all technical means to treat them, but putting other means at the service of an allegedly absurd, illicit, humiliating, and an attempt on their own health, physical and mental.”
To Público, Hospital Lusíadas confirms that it received the lawyer’s letter “containing the report of a set of facts without any correspondence with the reality of the clinical process in question”. He says that he is evaluating the situation and that he “has full confidence in the integrity and professionalism of his medical staff, which, in the present case, acted in strict compliance with the law and with those that are their duties to patients and the community in which it operates”.
It does not answer any of the questions posed by the Public, such as: what is the protocol referred to, how many cases of drug transport in the intestine has the hospital detected since it opened, how many times these doctors and this hospital have subjected patients to procedures of this type and how many of these were they Portuguese? The PSP also did not respond to questions asked this Monday afternoon.
Hospital de São José never came across a doctor to report
In general, do hospitals have a protocol to follow in similar cases? How do the authorities deal with these types of situations? How often is it in Portugal to have patients in hospitals with acorns and doctors denounce them?
The Medical Association states that there is no protocol in this area. The Hospital de São José, where cases detected by the authorities are referred, especially at Lisbon airport, says that it has “no knowledge of any established protocol”.
Without knowing the specific case, the Centro Hospitalar Universitário Lisboa Central, to which São José belongs, even claims that it has never come across a complaint by a doctor: “We are not aware of any notification to the police by a doctor of CHULC, since individuals in the situation described do not come to the emergency unit of their own free will, unless they are already in an emergency condition, which will never have happened in the CHULC Emergency Room (HS José). accompanied by elements of the Judiciary Police.”
In other words, it is the PJ who indicates the suspicion and “the hospital approach is clinical” and “directed to force the natural elimination of the acorns, which is witnessed by the PJ’s elements and kept by them as evidence”. The entire “medical approach” is made “in the interest of protecting the suspected individual while sick,” he says. CHULC does not know how to count the number of cases of individuals with drug acorns who have passed through the hospital.
According to the PJ, which investigates international drug trafficking, cases of drug transport in the body are small compared to the total: in 2021 five cases were identified (there were 23 as drug couriers in general), in 2020 there were 26 (there were 69 as postal services in general) and in 2019 there were 64 (there were 187 as postal services in general).
Artur Vaz, director of the National Unit to Combat Drug Trafficking (UNCTE) since 2018, does not comment on this specific case. It states that, as a rule, suspicion is made by the investigation and by other police or trafficking prevention authorities. “Sometimes it’s the SEF itself [Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras] which indicates.”
Anyway, when there is strong evidence that the person is carrying drugs inside the body, they are taken to a hospital. “If you have this distrust, an x-ray will remove any doubts”, he says. Confirming the presence of the “packaging” by medical examinations, the treatment is continued to expel the referred ones. The director says, however, that the expelling process is done in private. There has to be a police control, but the person has to have this privacy. Otherwise it would be “violating people’s dignity.”
Usually, the acorns are between five to six centimeters, inside they carry several, and can vary between 600 grams and two kilos, he says. There are rare, “marginal” cases, in which people go to the hospital but out of desperation, because they fear the acorns will burst and they denounce themselves, he concludes.
As a rule, drug couriers are “fragile people, who are in situations of poverty, which makes them easy targets to be recruited by criminal organizations”, he describes.
In the letter he sent to the Lusíadas, Jorlan Vieira and the lawyer asked for a meeting with the hospital, the assumption of responsibilities, an apology and compensation. Otherwise they would resort to all means to assert their rights. By the time this issue was closed, they had not received a response.
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