Dr. Johnny Connolly:

There has been the emergence of a tentative debate. Another thing that is happening on a global level is a large meeting in the UN called UNGASS, which is planned for 2016, and will review the so-called war on drugs.

There are three different dimensions to the debate. One is the arguments for legalisation, which have been heard here from different perspectives. Legalisation is being advocated from a legal perspective; it is argued that it is a human right for people to do with their bodies what they want to do. Much of the emphasis has been on cannabis in particular, and there have been developments in North America in which many states have legalised cannabis.

Research has been carried out recently on the head shop phenomenon. I think that injected a dose of reality into the debate to a certain degree in that it showed that people who might not have previously experimented with psychotropic substances or mind-altering substances did so when they were made available to them, and locally available. It challenged the argument that is often used in the legalisation debate that it does not matter what the law says because people will use drugs anyway, and it does not matter what one says or does. I think the head shop phenomenon really challenged that and it made people realise that availability and access do matter and the law does matter. That is one side of it.

The other area in which there has been interest here, in particular, is decriminalisation. The CityWide Drugs Crisis Campaign has recently urged a debate on decriminalisation. I think it is important to make a distinction between legalisation and decriminalisation. When one talks about legalisation one is talking about the regulation of a drug. A lot of this pertains to cannabis. What impact will it have on a community that has a serious drug problem if cannabis is dealt by the same person who is dealing crack? Young people might smoke cannabis but not touch crack, but if the two drugs are in proximity to each other one has to take account of the impact that might have.

Decriminalisation is a different type of thing. That means taking the sanction of the criminal system away from somebody who might be caught in possession of drugs for personal use - any drug, perhaps. The person may have an addiction. The evidence from the model that has been adopted in Portugal, which was the first European country to introduce decriminalisation in 1990, has been quite positive. Initially it led to a slight increase in the prevalence of drug use, but that has now stabilised and Portugal has seen a sharp drop in drug-related deaths, for example. That was decriminalisation of all drugs for personal use in a public health context, with people being diverted away from the criminal justice system into a dissuasion commission which looks at social work issues, legal issues, treatment issues and so on. Many countries around the world have engaged with different forms of decriminalisation.

The third dimension is the need to recalibrate the balance between the criminal justice system - where many countries have focused much of their resources - and the public health system to try to find a more appropriate balance between law enforcement and criminal justice approaches and the public health response. Maybe there is work that can be done in that respect.