Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for coming in and for their excellent work on the citizens’ assembly. This has been a forthright and healthy debate and one that has needed to happen for some time. We would all agree that we have had six decades of legislation that has not worked. It has criminalised whole swaths of communities and left in its wake a trail of failure. If anybody in this room can say we have had six decades of misuse of drugs legislation that has worked, I would like to hear about it. What it has done is criminalise people, put people into the prisons and embolden and enrich a tiny few individuals in society who have done extremely well out of the drugs industry. Drugs are going to be used, whether we like it or not. There is drug use, drug abuse and everything in between.

My question concerns the interpretation of the health-led approach and decriminalisation. My instinct is that there are different interpretations of what decriminalisation looks like in an Irish context. From my reading of the situation, I am of the view certain sections of the Government, certain sections of civil society and certain sections of the police actually want the status quo to remain. In fact, they want to even go further; they want society to go backwards. That applies to certain sections of those three entities. In order to make decriminalisation work and to start changing things, we have to look at the Misuse of Drugs Act. If we do not change that, it is very arbitrary how decriminalisation will work and how it can benefit society.

Decriminalisation is a good model, but we need to go further. The elephant in the room when it comes to decriminalisation is that the black market still exists. The ultimate irony is that the drugs are not controlled by the Government or the State but by criminal gangs. Once we have that situation in place, we will have what we have had in the past six decades. Do the witnesses think the establishment and those three bodies have the stomach to go further than just paying lip service to a health-led approach and implement decriminalisation, even along the lines of the Portuguese model, which itself has limitations?