Mr. Daragh Connolly:

The issue around decriminalisation, which is not a process of legalisation, is quite broad. We know that An Garda Síochána is under a lot of pressure to do its job and is up against it within the judicial system. It is a professional law enforcement agency and knows its punters as we know our patients in our pharmacies. The Garda has no legal discretion as to whether to arrest or not arrest a person who has a small amount of cannabis for personal use, for example. When the joint justice committee of the previous Dáil considered how other jurisdictions deal with this issue, it recognised that the system in Portugal works best. The amount of petty crime there has decreased because people are not sucked into a world of criminality. A criminal record for drug use stays with a person for life, and that person then starts to move towards criminality rather than the ordinary life we would wish for people to have. It also diverts people away from a healthcare system because they have been labelled as criminals. That is not to say that people there do not have an interaction with the judiciary but, rather, that they are assessed on medical need rather than by the judiciary. It is a big and complex issue and it is probably fair to say that no jurisdiction has completely gotten on top of it. However, in countries such as Holland, Sweden, Switzerland and Portugal where the healthcare approach has been taken fewer teenagers use illicit drugs and fewer persons die of overdoses or have problem addictions.