Ms Anna Quigley:

No, the stigma has not reduced at all. We do not have any objective measures of stigma but there is no question whatsoever that the stigma has not reduced in any way. The fact that we are still criminalising people is the ultimate stigma. In terms of how it is covered by the media, the simplest way to describe it is that we are still in a moral judgment space with the drugs policy and that is the ultimate stigmatisation. This links in with the stuff in prisons as well. Once an issue is being dealt with in that sort of crime, bad behaviour, and bad people doing bad things space, which is where we still have it, then that is the ultimate stigma a State can put on people.

One cannot compare the current drug situation with what happened 30 years ago because it was entirely different then and was a completely different world. In 1995, we started to campaign on this issue in communities and it was with the belief, which sounds naive and silly now, that we were going to be able to solve this problem and end up removing drugs from our communities. Obviously that is what we thought at the time and we now know that is not going to happen.

What we have learned in that time is that it is not a future where there are no drugs and we have no drug problems. People will always use drugs and we will always have issues with drugs but we need to learn how to manage them. As I said at the start, in managing them, we have to look at the evidence and what it tells us. It tells us 100% clearly that the worst harms are still in the most disadvantaged and the poorest communities. That and the stigma are 100% related. At one stage, we were involved in a poll with RedC to try to measure stigma. One question people were asked was whether they would be okay living next door to someone who used drugs. Approximately 70% of people said no, they would not. We were having a conversation about it afterwards and asking how you would even know. For someone living in an average housing estate, their neighbour could be smoking cannabis or having cocaine on a Saturday and this person would not know and it would not bother them as it would have no impact on them. For most people who think of a person using drugs, they will see the person who is in serious trouble. Those are the people on the street who are visible. Immediately that is what people think of and that is massively stigmatising. However, we keep saying that people are not seeing a problem related to drug use but a problem related to poverty, homelessness, housing and failures of housing policy because no one chooses to use their drugs on the street if they have somewhere else they can be.

In ways, the problem has become more complex and more difficult. We have also learned very positive things about what can work and what can make a difference. There are many examples across every sector, whether it is statutory, prisons or elsewhere, of what works best, but the biggest problem now is that we are not building on that. We are going backwards because we have abandoned the fundamental principles that any kind of success we have had has come from partnership. Everybody accepts that and everybody knows there has to be an interagency approach. Again, the experience from Portugal shows that when it ended criminalisation, it was entirely a question of housing services, employment services and psychological services going with it. They have to.