Dr. Sharon Lambert:

A significant amount of money is spent on a justice-related response to addiction. Moving addiction into the mental health space will reduce the stigma. There are people who will remember the 1980s in Ireland, when we did not talk about mental health at all. We just did not talk about it at all. Nobody had depression or anxiety. In fact, when people died by suicide, it was often not written down that this was how they had died because there was such stigma and shame. We have come an awfully long way from those days and this was a result of fundamentally seeing a shift in how we think about mental health. A public health campaign is needed that reduces the stigma and shame associated with addiction and that is also supported by the required amount of money involved in addressing addiction. The relapse rates have been mentioned. This is because there is such a queue of people trying to get into addiction services. They are really desperate and people are trying to get them through.

We looked at this situation before when I worked in a service. For every €4 we were spending on treatment, we were only spending €1 on aftercare, and this is when people are at the highest risk of relapse.

It is also when there is the highest risk of death as well, unfortunately, if you relapse and go back to using those substances. There is a huge amount of money invested in road traffic to try to reduce road traffic deaths. Reframing it as a public health issue, because it still feels very much like it is a criminal justice issue, is important.