Co-Chairman (Deputy David Stanton):

On behalf of my colleagues on the Joint Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality, I welcome the Minister of State and his officials. Like my Co-Chairman, I apologise to everybody for the long delay in reconvening the meeting. My committee has done a lot of work on this area. Recently, a number of us visited Portugal to look at the Portuguese approach to the drugs issue. It has dissuasion committees where people are not actually put into the criminal justice system. For small amounts of drugs for personal use, people are sent for education and rehabilitation, treatment and so on and that seems to work pretty well. It ensures the Portuguese police can put more of its resources into tracking down dealers and sellers of drugs.

Today's meeting of the two committees is historic and it is one of the first times this has happened. It shows how seriously we take the issue of drugs. This morning we heard an interesting presentation by people from Monaghan on so-called legal highs. At the time, I pointed out that the monitoring committee of the European Union had told us that two or three legal highs are being detected each week, that there are 450 of these, which are monitored by the agency, and that the number is growing exponentially. We are in a new drugs era. The idea of somebody selling drugs on a back street is gone and people now use the Internet, the dark web, and social media. A while ago, someone told me that people use drones and all kinds of technologies to sell this stuff. There are labs across the world churning out different types of very dangerous chemicals which we are now, unfortunately, beginning to experience here. Therefore, we must treat this matter extremely seriously. We welcome the fact that we now have a dedicated Minister of State. There is no better person than the Minister of State present to lead this initiative. A number of months ago, my committee recommended a dedicated Minister of State when we examined the issue first. I look forward to the engagement and to what the Minister of State has to say to us.