Dr. Sharon Lambert:

Sometimes drug prevention is confused with drug education. The reality is that people do use drugs. People have always used drugs and will continue to use drugs. Dr. O'Shea is right in saying that going in and talking about drug prevention has not worked. A few years ago, I believe the World Health Organization and the UN said we needed a fundamental shift in how we think about mental health. I spoke about the medical model, which views the individual as the problem. Every time we sit around and talk about human behaviour, it is asking ourselves who is in the room and who is not. There are too many times when decisions around health behaviour are discussed and there is not a psychological, psychotherapy or social part to that discussion.

There needs to be a class analysis of what we do and the way we do it. The statistics we have from the HRB show that some people in our country are able to use drugs without experiencing too much harm while others end up with their lives absolutely ruined because of social inequality and access to services. The Garda one is a good example. There are lots of amazing youth workers, Garda youth diversion workers and juvenile liaison officers, JLOs. Have we given those youth projects enough money so that they do not have to rely on a Garda van, for example? There are young people going to youth projects whose parents would not think it acceptable for their children to pull up outside a play activity centre arriving in a Garda van. Are those projects getting enough money so that they can deliver what from the outside looks like equality?

I have had the fun of arriving at an activity centre with a group of young people from a Garda youth diversion project in what was clearly a Garda van. The minute we stepped off the bus it was a hostile reception. Young people did not appreciate the reception and then we left within ten minutes. I know that if I brought that same group of young people there in a different van, that would not have happened. I know that their parents would not have thought it was acceptable and that is because we do not always do a class analysis.

Are all our young people getting access to the same thing in the same way, or are we doing it differently based on their ethnicity and class, which makes them always stand out? They then do not always get the full benefit of what it is we wanted to deliver to them, which is what the youth workers, the Garda youth diversion workers and the JLOs want. I apologise; that was a very long and roundabout thing.