Mr. Brian Galvin:

We have come a long way from the early 1990s and the Rabbitte report. At that time, there was no opportunity for anybody who was using heroin. Now, we have introduced the methadone programme, we have needle exchange if they decide to cease treatment, and we are going opening up a supervised injection facility. We still have a high number of deaths - there is no question about that - but a lot is being done to keep people well and alive. We have a way of measuring the hidden population of opioid users, mainly those on heroin. The last time we looked at it was 2019 and we are updating the research now. It shows that the numbers are very small in the younger cohort of 15 to 24-year-olds. In the older cohorts, because they are living longer, to be as brutal as that, there is the same number of opiod users in the country, that is close to 20,000, as we had back in 2006. That overall number is not changing.

They have access to a lot more sophisticated services and they have more opportunities to use drugs in a safe way. If you use needle exchanges, it saves lives. If you use naloxone, it saves lives. Supervised injection facilities are going to save lives as well. I do not want to use phrases like "everything has failed" because it has not but we have achieved a lot. Opioid users always were the main problem drug user coming in for treatment. That changed in the mid 2010s and cannabis became the most common drug for those coming in to treatment for two to three years. That has been overtaken by cocaine. I was talking with a colleague yesterday who is looking at all the indicators of cocaine and she said something mad happened in 2015 and everything has been going up since then. As for those coming for treatment, from the population study we can see it is the highest in Europe and cocaine deaths are a significant portion of the overall number of deaths. It is an entirely new problem and I think in some ways, people can be fixed on the old model and that model is shifting.

Thankfully, we have hardly seen any fentanyl here. We have to be careful not to adopt the model of North America, which is astonishing because the numbers are unbelievable. Last year in Europe, about 8,000 people died from opioid overdoses. In America, it was close to 20 times that. There is no complacency here because many things came last year and created a lot of damage but I think the response was quite astonishing and lives were again saved. We are in a much better position to save lives. Recovery is a whole other issue that we have to examine but on that hard crisis of deaths, there is a lot to do but we have achieved a lot.