Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party)
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I thank the Leas-Chathaoirleach. I want to use my four minutes to talk about potency of drugs. Before I do, I wish to return to the issue of Oregon reversing some of its work on drug decriminalisation. It is important we put on record that when it took that action three years ago it interacted with a thirteenfold increase in drug overdose due to fentanyl, which nobody who engaged in that lawmaking could have envisaged. Also, the legislators themselves said there is an interaction with homelessness. One of the problems for Oregon is it has rampant homelessness and one of the ways it dealt with that was effectively by putting people into the system and without relying on drugs and drug possession to do that it had no way to effectively move people on within communities if they were homeless. I wanted to say that because I have been following the Oregon thing very closely.

One of my interests here is the change in potency. We have talked a little about the change in the type of drugs we are seeing and in synthetic drugs. In the past few decades we have also seen an increase in potency in drugs we are more familiar with, like cannabis, which can be seven to eight times more potent. That is before we start looking at the addition of more psychoactive substances. I think it is called polysubstance use where people are adding bits together. The HSE is doing work on monitoring potency of all sorts of substances, but with a justice-led approach, when the Garda is stopping and searching for standard possession, what is the approach to understanding and documenting the potency of particular substances? What is the communication and interaction between these two groups?