Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 3 October 2024
Committee on Drugs Use
A Health-Led Approach: Discussion (Resumed)
9:30 am
Dr. Sharon Lambert:
Daniel Callaghan recently finished his PhD, and I have looked at various aspects of that. When somebody dies as a result of drugs, it is called a bad death. In bereavement, there are good deaths and bad deaths. The former is one relating to a natural cause, whereas the latter is one associated with stigma. Families who have been bereaved as a result of a drug-related death do not get the same sympathy. It is as though their son or daughter made that choice. That is what we used to say about suicide 20 or 30 years ago but we are still saying it about drugs.
Moreover, this impacts not just families but also communities and workers. People who work in front-line services, especially out in the community, develop very long-term close relationships with the people they support, and when they die, they are devastated. They also experience it as a bad death. It does have an impact. We have an issue with recruitment and retention in front-line services, especially homelessness and addiction, because people get really burned out from the demands outweighing the resources.
The Deputy spoke about the budget.
An additional €4 million was allocated. That is slightly less than the €4.1 million provided for greyhounds and horses.
The Deputy asked what we are going to do about it and when will we intervene. This is fundamentally about structural inequality. This is fundamentally about the fact some people experience more harm from their drug use as a result of poverty and classism. In the UK, the British Psychological Society wrote a White Paper on why classism should be added to the list of discrimination. People from working class communities do not get the same access. Members could probably count on one hand how many are from working-class communities. They are probably the ones who are coming in here and turning up to these kinds of events, because people who are not from working-class communities are not experiencing the same harm. We do not even have equal representation in the context of the people who make policy and formulate the rules. Someone who has not experienced poverty does not understand things like it being cheaper to tax a car for 12 months than for three. The people who can only afford to tax their car for three months are penalised by the State for having less money. That is the State. I can understand when private companies do that, but we could stop them. Buying a card for €10 to top up my electricity meter costs more per unit than it does for a person who can take the risk of having a direct debit coming out of their account. We think poor people are bad at managing their money, but we make it really hard to be poor and to get out of poverty. When you are poor, it causes poor mental health. People sometimes people use drugs and alcohol to manage that.
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