Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein)

I asked about the areas where there was least progress and the Minister outlined six actions that were required. I accept more work must be done in the needle exchange area. Recently I was approached by a family in Cork whose son was in the local hospital. There was no room in the psychiatric unit so he ended up in the geriatric unit. The family informed me that their son must go to Dublin every day to get treatment. There is no methadone treatment in the Cork or Limerick area so people are travelling to Dublin every day.

One of the difficulties for people in those areas is that if they want to move on or get a job, for example, their life revolves around getting another drug. It revolved around that before they went for treatment but the concept of the treatment is to move people forward. The Minister should examine this because it is one of the issues that must be tackled. It is like a badge of courage for the health board in the area to say there is no methadone treatment there.

There is a physeptone bus operating in Dublin. It has been operating for eight years. It was supposed to be a temporary measure. It is unacceptable because there is no anonymity and so forth. This should be reconsidered and action taken on it.

With regard to treatment, according to a response from the Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, there is a waiting time of 19 months for people in the Athlone area for treatment. That is unacceptable. The waiting time is six months in other areas. In my constituency it is nine weeks. Places on community schemes are not being taken up by the health service. Perhaps the Minister will deal with this.

There is also the new drug, cocaine. One action could be dealing with the lack of cocaine drug counsellors. I accept there is a need to retrain people, but for the long term we must look to other countries that have had some success tackling this new problem. There are schemes in New York which have had huge success with the heroin problem. Perhaps the health service and the Department would consider them. We must look outside the box.

I accept there has been movement on this issue but there is still a huge amount to be tackled.

See this speech in context