Dr. Cian Ó Concubhair:

Criminalisation has been very effective at stigmatising conduct. The evidence for that is really strong. It can play out in many realms, including impacting on people's careers and their ability to engage in all sorts of activities that other citizens are allowed to do. The State has huge power in its ability to shape people's lives in those respects. What it has not been very effective at doing is deterring, that is, changing people's attitudes to the activity itself. As we have already discussed, for the vast majority of people who engage in drug use, it is not problematic. They do it because they see it as adding value to their lives. The question then is whether it is legitimate for the State to continue to punish and stigmatise that conduct if it is not achieving other aims, namely, deterrence or harm reduction.

My point is that the State has great power to impose societal stigma. Some of the pushback we see and some of the anxieties we hear from members of the public really demonstrate that. What the State has not been successful at doing is providing deterrence. The two things are fundamentally different. Stigmatisation absolutely can have deterrent functions but, at its core, at least in my view of the criminal law, stigmatisation is more to do with imposing just desserts. It is a retributive view. Part of the function of the criminal law, and it is often appropriate, is to impose just desserts. That is really what the stigmatisation is doing. It is less about deterrence. The deterrence might come from the punishment that is imposed. In the Irish context, the potential punishments are quite harsh. The stigma itself is really around making a moral judgment on the conduct.