Dr. Bernard Kenny:

We are all practising clinical physicians, in addition to our jobs with the ICGP, so the bulk of our week is made up with seeing patients day in and day out. From our point of view, we can currently see the direct harm of drug use. You can already recognise from the national numbers that our death rate from drug overdoses is far too high. Our numbers are disproportionately high compared with elsewhere in the EU. I say we have reached that critical stage currently, if we had not done so already in the past number of years. We do not believe that people who are using and are addicted to drugs should be penalised for that.