Dr. Denis O'Driscoll:

I will set out my experience with regard to fentanyls in particular. There was a period when we saw them very briefly, but they then disappeared from the marketplace. Dr. Crowley and I had a discussion about nitazenes before. We expected it to be a much bigger problem but it has not yet come. Will it still come? We are not sure because if we look at the early warning emerging trends from Europe, we can see that the most significant types of drugs that are increasing in volume - new, novel and emerging substances - are stimulant-style drugs. You are also seeing significant synthetic cannabinoids coming through. The nitazenes have not come as we expected them to come. My experience on the hopes around the Taliban has been there is always another player in the global market who will happily step up and start growing it. My understanding is that it may become a south-east Asian product shortly and that is the new route for opium for heroin. That is not to negate anything else. It has been highlighted by the European drug agency that they seem to be going down the route of methamphetamines and into the stimulant market. There is always a risk that we will see newer products and we do not know what they are. There was a classic one in the prison service recently where we had overdoses that expressed themselves to look like an opioid overdose but it turned out that the predominant product was a novel benzodiazepine not seen before on the Irish market. The way that markets work is that you can source products, which previously you could not source, through the dark web and in various other ways. That is what makes it very difficult to say what the next big thing is going to be. There seems to be a wide range of products that can be chosen from and picked. You can get whatever one suits you at that moment in time.