Professor Bobby Smyth:

There is a suggestion that drug use is much more common in deprived communities. Certainly, the evidence from national surveys does not bear that out. Again, the more recent general population survey indicates that rates of drug use are pretty much evenly distributed across the entire economic domain, so that is certainly not the only or even a massive driver of drug use. At the end of the day, our drug laws are a very small but important component of our wider drug policy, which needs to look at prevention, which means looking at the social, family, individual, school and community-based determinants of drug use, which is where Iceland has been particularly strong. We should have optimism about our ability to suppress demand for drug use. It is not all about laws and legislative responses.

We need better treatment but we do not seem to talk about treatment. The whole conversation about drug policy in Ireland for the past ten years has been completely overshadowed by this relatively minor issue, because those intent on drug legalisation will not let it go. It is the only thing we are allowed to talk about within the drug policy domain over the past decade. We do not talk about the big needs in terms of treatment and what we could or should be doing in terms of prevention.