Lynn Ruane (Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for the presentations. Sometimes, there is a fear. People fear that politicians moving towards a response to drug use in a health way is somehow saying that addiction or something is okay. There is this shift that does not seem to happen in people's head in that you cannot police your way out of addiction. The response to addiction is never a policeman, a judge or a cell. I refer to the idea that somehow having this moral oversight from a policing perspective is somehow going to address addiction in any shape of form. We need to make a real effort to be able to separate those two things. I have always struggled to understand how we can seem to untangle it. I wonder whether it is a frame of mind in terms of the types of people who visibly end up in addiction. There is a level of profiling in that for me in terms of poor communities, vulnerable communities, black and brown communities and the Traveller community. If we are looking at addiction as being a thing to which we want to respond, we need to look at how we can shift that culture from a law being needed to respond to addiction to looking at why there is addiction in the first place and what addiction is responding to, especially when it is felt by whole communities or certain communities. It is not even a policing question for me. Who is creating that narrative? Is the police creating the narrative that we need to have this because it has no other way to profile these communities and arrest them for all these other things if we do not criminalise addiction or is there a societal lack of understanding as to why addiction exists in the first place? It is not necessarily because of supply; it is a completely different thing. I am not sure if I am being very clear. Maybe Dr. Ó Concubhair and Mr. Glynn can come in.