Professor Alex Stevens:

I will give it a try. In general, and including in the Irish context, I see no reason to continue the criminalisation of people who use drugs for simple possession. As I have said in my statement, there is little or no evidence that threatening people with punishment just for the use of drugs reduces the use of drugs. There are good reasons it does not work. We have known for centuries in criminology that to be effective, punishment needs to be certain and swift rather than severe. Given the inevitably limited capacity of the police to catch more than a tiny proportion of people who use drugs or a tiny proportion of the incidence of drug use, it is very unlikely that it will ever be certain or swift that anyone using drugs will be caught doing so. Most people who are involved in drug use do not see a realistic prospect that they will be caught and, therefore, there is no deterrent. In terms of the people who get caught, however severe the punishment of them, it does not generalise to a general deterrent against drug use. There is a logical mechanism for the failure of criminalisation of people who use drugs to actually reduce drug use. Therefore, for Ireland or for any other country, I would recommend decriminalisation of the use and possession of drugs. The simplest way to do that is to change the law to remove the criminal offence of possession from the law. The other options that I have mentioned, such as depenalisation and diversion, will always be open to the discretion of police and prosecutors. We do not have very good evidence from Ireland because no evidence is kept, as far as I am aware, on the ethnicity or the part of the population that people are coming from but we know from many other countries, including my own unfortunately, that when there is discretion, there is inequality. If there is to be a fair drug policy, the de jure decriminalisation of drug possession is more likely to achieve such an outcome.