Mr. Tony Duffin:

The point is well made. People who use drugs on the streets in other jurisdictions have, in a way, been scapegoats for the whole health-led or decriminalised approach. Other issues, such as housing ending after Covid, have all been conflated. There is now a kind of pullback from a decriminalisation or health-led approach. Street drug use is something that needs to be managed. We do not allow people to consume alcohol in public. We have by-laws in Dublin that allow the Garda to remove alcohol, for example, which the Senator mentioned. We would have to consider how we would manage that similarly. We do not want people openly using drugs on the streets where they cannot be told that they cannot be doing that. That is common across many cities and jurisdictions.

I visited Bogotá in Colombia where that is exactly the case in law. People can have certain drugs at home but they cannot have them on the streets. I was asked to speak there about how Bogotá would manage a thing called basuco, which is a very toxic form of cocaine mixed with petrol and things. It is a devastating situation. The authorities in Bogotá wanted to talk about how they were going to manage it. My point is it will be the same thing here when it comes to how we will manage it. Drug consumption rooms are part of the answer to that.

Allowing people to come in and use safely does not instigate drug use; it responds to drug use.