John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I apologise that I was not present for the beginning of the presentation. I pay tribute to the great work ongoing in the area of drug rehabilitation and treatment, harm reduction and population safety. When I was elected to the Seanad a few years ago, I set off on a personal series of fact-finding missions. I visited Merchant's Quay, Hyde Park and other treatment centres. Quite a few people came to chat with me. I feel quite strongly about drug policy and we are doing it wrong. I am delighted to hear some of the opinions aired at this meeting.

I like to think I am a rationalist and an empiricist. One does a bit of research, looks at the results and sees if something has worked. What we have done in the war on drugs has clearly not worked, and by any logical definition what the western countries in general have done in trying to contain the drugs problem and reduce the associated harm, particularly to individuals with drug problems, has not been successful. We have as high a number of drug addicts as we have ever had.

I get accused of a little inconsistency in this but we can consider the different types of substance problems, and one size does not fit all. We should be aiming for the elimination of legal commerce in tobacco at some fixed stage in the future. If people want to sell tobacco at that point, they will not be doing it in a boardroom in New York or London but in the way the Medellin cartel does its business. It would not be feasible. As a society we need to acknowledge that we probably drink two or three times too much compared with what we used to, and in individual cases this may be much more or else just fine. We need to reduce the number of units of alcohol consumed in society.

The different forms of illegitimate non-alcohol and non-tobacco drugs have different problems as well. I have always been of the opinion that opiate or opioid heroin or morphine addiction is a specific problem. I saw some data approximately two years ago that suggested if we considered a timeframe before the economic bubble, during it and afterwards, cocaine use went up as we got more money and went down as we lost it. Heroin use, on the other hand, stayed the same, which told us something very powerful about heroin. Heroin addiction is as much a medical problem as cancer or diabetes, and the treatment must be medical. I took a tremendous amount of a flak a couple of years ago when I suggested that we medicalise heroin. It is something we need to consider.

I apologise for my absence earlier. The delegates may have given us the figures, but do we know how many heroin or opiate addicts there are in Ireland and how many are regularly engaged with treatment, rehab and other services? I have kept asking this question and nobody seems to be clear on it, but I get the sense that many are not engaged with services. For some, this is owing to a lack of access. When I first came here, I was surprised to discover how centralised methadone services were and that many people on methadone programmes had long commutes to access them, which is a disincentive in some cases. How many of those who are not engaged with services are not engaged because methadone does not do it for them and they still want heroin? How many of those outside our net of interaction with caring social, medical and rehabilitation services and are instead buying drugs on the street from some of the worst elements of society could be brought into the net if we were giving them heroin and not methadone? There is an element of a guesstimate in this regard. I thank the delegates for what they do.