Ireland Moving Towards Decriminalisation of Drugs

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Image source: mynewsla.com

Ireland’s Minister of State for the National Drugs Strategy, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, visited the London School of Economics on Monday to deliver a keynote speech to their international workshop on drugs policy. Over the course of his speech, Mr Ó Ríordáin stated that “a cultural shift in how we regard substance misuse” is needed “if we are to break this cycle and make a serious attempt to tackle drug and alcohol addiction.”

In Mr Ó Ríordáin’s eyes this sort of shift will come about not from punishing addicts, but by helping them instead, and that ideally, “regardless of the drug, the individual needs an intervention and society will be saying, ‘the substance is illegal, but you are not a criminal for taking it’.” It is for this reason that Mr Ó Ríordáin, as Ireland’s chief of National Drugs Strategy, is in favour of the overall decriminalisation of drugs.

He is not alone, either, suggesting in an interview with The Irish Times that there is currently a “strong consensus that drugs across the board should be decriminalised.” Something he clarified as meaning it would still be against the law to profit from the sale or distribution of drugs, which would remain very much illegal, it would just be that drug users would no longer be criminalised for their addictions, or usage.

This wider support for a shift in policy toward the de-vilification of the user was further evidenced during Mr Ó Ríordáin’s speech at the London School of Economics, when he announced plans that are already underway to open “injection rooms” in Dublin next year. Cork, Galway, and Limerick are intended to follow soon after. The idea of the rooms being a supervised area where addicts can go to lessen the numerous risks associated with injection, “including homeless drug users who would otherwise take drugs in the open, creating risks to themselves and the public.”

“A medically supervised injecting centre is not a ‘free for all’ for those who wish to inject drugs; it is a clinical, controlled environment which aims to engage a hard to reach population of drug user and provide defined pathways to higher threshold treatment services such as medical and social interventions and counselling services…Research has shown that the use of supervised injecting centres is associated with self-reported reductions in injecting risk behaviours.”

However, the minister made sure to not get ahead of himself, and has made it clear that there is still much work to be done moving towards decriminalisation, including getting people’s heads around what that actually means and an upcoming general election;

“I think if we’re going to introduce decriminalisation in Ireland it will take a number of years to get the systems in place to deliver it effectively. Because it is a major policy shift, it does require an awful lot of debate, research and understanding that the dynamics in Ireland are very different to the dynamics in Portugal. But as a model, I think it’s a progressive way forward. I think it’s much more humane and I think it makes absolute sense if you have 70 per cent of your drug convictions for possession for personal use. Those resources could be much better used tackling the pushers not the takers.”

“Above all the mode must be person-centred and involve an integrated approach to treatment and rehabilitation based on a continuum of care with clearly defined referral pathways.”

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