Professor Bobby Smyth:

As the Deputy knows, we currently regulate the sale, manufacture, distribution of a drug - it is called alcohol. As I said, it kills more people than all illegal drugs combined. It does so not because it is intrinsically more harmful or dangerous than heroine or crack cocaine. It does so largely because its use is normalised and because there is regulated access to it. We face challenges in terms of our alcohol policy. We are where we are with alcohol and hence we had the public health alcohol Bill a number of years ago and it has slowly been enacted. These are small steps in the right direction. All of these increased restriction. I would be very loath to move any other substance into that category of regulated sale until I saw our current legal drug regulated more effectively and the harms with it massively reduced.