John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and his officials. I really wish the Minister of State well. This is perhaps the greatest example of a situation where we need first thinking. This is a classical example of society, and not just Irish society, looking at something in a certain way for 50 or 60 years, seeing the evidence stacking up, ceiling high, that what we are doing is wrong but continuing to do it. In medicine and in science, we believe in empiricism and in testing something and if it fails, we say that it failed and that it is time to try something else. In terms of dealing with drug policy, we have not been good at that. Effectively, we are doing the same kind of things now that were done in the 1950s and 1960s with subtle nuances. When I say "we" I do not mean we in Ireland, I mean globally in the western world in the way we tackle the problem. I am not making any personal criticisms or, indeed, any professional or systems criticism of the way we do things in Ireland, because we do it pretty much the same way that most other people do it and we do it wrong.

I am a parent. I have four children and I hope none of them takes drugs. I do not want anybody to think I am saint, which means that I am somehow soft on drugs or that I am some kind of an aging hippy - I am aging - who has got some kind of liberal ideas because I do not; I am very anti-drugs. I would cast a weather eye on people using drugs in any sphere of my life and would do everything I could to stop them doing it. I think we all have that as a goal. I made a few suggestions over the past eight years about different ways of doing it, and one takes a certain amount of personal criticism for that. People assume that somehow one is soft on drugs or one is soft on drug users. I am absolutely well aware of the devastation caused by drugs to individuals, their families and society at large.

The war on drugs has cost hundreds of billions of euro. One would have to say it is as unqualified a failure as we have ever seen internationally in anything. The number of people who are using drugs in most countries is higher than it ever was. There have been very few instances of countries where drug use has systematically gone down or the number of people whose lives are damaged by drugs has gone down.

The major emphasis on interdiction and criminalisation and the metric of success being the street value of the stuff police have in whatever part of the world when they have the great photo opportunities with all the great big bags of stuff they have seized is irrelevant. The metric has to be how many people are taking drugs, how much they are using, what kind of drugs are they using and the cost of the devastation to their health, their families and society. That is what we really should be looking at. The Minister of State has already given us many hints that he is looking at the alternative approach, one which is best exemplified by the Portuguese, by other selective centres in Scotland and by other places that have gone into a harm reduction approach and a medicalisation approach for many of the drugs but one of the key things is to look critically at being brave enough to say to people that we may end up reducing some of the emphasis on police and on naval vessels and that we may do something rather different in the way we are trying to tackle the problem. It is not because we have given up, that we do not care, that we are pro-drugs or that we are liberal but because what we have done in the past has not worked. That is a hard message to get across because people assume that if one is not being übertough on drugs or sounding like someone from the Tennessee state house, that somehow one is some kind of a communist.

It is critically important to dissect this problem into the many problems which it is. In the cancer world, it has dawned on us over the past 20 years that diseases which we thought were unitary in fact comprise many different kinds. Drug use is a similar analogy.

We cannot hope to tackle cocaine abuse in the same way we would seek to tackle heroin, marijuana, alcohol or tobacco use. We need to see all of these as interrelated issues.

I might be accused of a certain inconsistency in these matters in that I would not hesitate to tighten the noose on the tobacco industry and make it ever harder for it to sell its products. We should be aiming for zero tolerance on tobacco use. It is achievable if we give ourselves a 20-year timeframe and a clear statement of purpose that it will no longer be legal to engage in for-profit commerce in tobacco after some future debate. That type of timeframe would facilitate farmers to switch to other crops, give investment houses time to invest in something else and allow factories scope to retool and so on. At a time when the world is desperately short of food, we could use the bioprocessing capacity currently taken up with tobacco production for something other than growing cancer-causing, addictive drugs. In the case of alcohol, my view is that we should, as a society, be aiming for a huge reduction in the volume we consume. However, these matters are another day's work and I will not go into them today.

My views are somewhat different when it comes illegal drugs. In the case of opioids, which are a special problem on their own, I did some research during my first year as a member of this committee; we met with many individuals and stakeholders and participated in on-site inspections. I came away from all of this convinced that we must regard opioid use as its own particular problem. People with an opioid addiction have a medical illness, and the treatment for the withdrawal phase of opioid addiction is opioids. We need to get people desensitised and ultimately off the drug, but when somebody has an acute withdrawal, the treatment they really need is an opioid of some kind or they will get terribly ill. We need a strategy of harm reduction, which will inevitably involve medicalising the use of heroin and heroin-like drugs in a bigger way than we currently do. The physical manifestations of the illness and withdrawal are such that people, especially if they are in relatively low-income situations, will do anything to get the drug, with all the social chaos this causes not only for themselves, but also for their families.

I wish the Minister of State well in his undertaking and would be delighted to meet with him again for a more leisurely chat about these issues. I reiterate that when it comes to tackling drugs misuse, each aspect of the problem needs to be dissected and examined on its own merits. There will be no single solution.