Mr. Andy O'Hara:

Stigma is an important issue. I know from experience that when you move from being a recreational drug user to being dependent on hard drugs, everything changes. You become a pariah, something that is a problem. That is when people take harder drugs and more risks. You feel like you have nothing left to offer. Challenging stigma is important and valuable.

We produced peer-led research on how embedded stigma is across the systems. It is intersectional. This relates to how we criminalise people. We view people with a drug addiction, a gambling addiction or an alcohol addiction vastly differently. It is linked to how we criminalise them. The criminalisation approach, which stigmatises, becomes embedded across housing and healthcare, including mental health care. Our peers decided that what they really needed to do was research. They looked around and said some of the existing research was limited because it did not really highlight how structural the issue was. They highlighted the structural nature of it and from there developed a proposal to have a peer-led national campaign and peer-led training for all services, beginning at community and national levels, to unpack and drive a wedge through stigma. Stigma affects everyone, not just marginalised groups. Middle- and upper-class people may be affected. A GAA player who works in a bank is not going to go into his job tomorrow and then go home to his or her family and tell them he or she has an issue with drugs. No, he or she is probably going to wait until it escalates. Stigma affects everyone and what we need is a structured approach to unpack it and remove it from the system. That needs peer-led anti-stigma campaigns and peer-led training. It also requires a commitment to decriminalising people, because as long as we keep committing to criminalising people, we will be committing to causing undue harm.