Patrick Costello (Dublin South Central, Green Party)
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Again, focusing on demand reduction and why we use drugs can help. Better interventions can help. On Subutex – I will stick with the brand name because it is easier to pronounce – when I was working in Merchants Quay 20 years ago, it was widely used in the UK. Yet it was said it is only coming in here now. We seem to be quite far behind. Better interventions are very important but, again, just like it is not a choice between demand reduction or improving interventions, it is not necessarily a choice between looking at the criminal aspects of it and better interventions. We can do the demand reduction, better interventions and look at the criminal status of it all at the same time. When criminalisation gets in the way of the harm reduction and better interventions, that is where it becomes a problem. I refer to the delay to roll out Naloxone and things such as that. I look at other services where testing of pills for quality and safety is not done in this country because of the issues of criminality around it. Safe injection rooms are on hold essentially because of the criminalisation. Those are two harm reduction things that are being impacted by the criminalisation. The safe access for patients is being impacted by the criminalisation. Again, these are all, in a way, silos. They are all separate. We should be doing better interventions, demand reductions and providing the psychological supports because it is not just a purely chemical reaction and all of that.

I will come back to where I was going with the question. If the criminalisation - the prohibition - is getting in the way of the harm reduction and better interventions, surely we need to be looking at that so that we can ultimately have both better interventions and the demand reduction. We could talk about demand reduction for hours and hours in and of itself. It ties deeply into all the stuff Senator Ruane talked about in relation to poverty, exclusion and inequality. There is a whole host of things we could talk about simply looking at demand reduction. We could spend hours talking about better interventions, but they are not mutually exclusive. I am just conscious that there are many things being mixed up here.