Michael McNamara (Clare, Independent)
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I wish to advise members and witnesses on privilege. Parliamentary privilege is considered to apply to the utterances of members and anybody participating online in a committee meeting when their participation is within the parliamentary precincts. There can be no assurances in respect of participation online from outside the parliamentary precincts and contributors should be mindful of this when they are contributing.

The topic of our meeting is engagement on decriminalisation, depenalisation, diversion and legalisation, and we are looking at international comparisons. Committee members are interested to learn from the experiences of other countries regarding their drug policies. I welcome our witnesses, who are joining us by MS Teams, Deputy Chief Constable Fiona Wilson of the Vancouver Police Department and Mr. Kellen Russoniello, senior policy council with the Drug Policy Alliance. They are both very welcome. I am glad they had the time to meet with us and we were able to organise a meeting where they could both participate.

I invite Deputy Chief Constable Wilson to give her opening statement.