Noel Ahern (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail)

There are prevention, education and awareness campaigns. Prevention is one of the five pillars of the strategy. In large part it is focused on the cannabis level, through schools. Under the SPHE programme, all schools include addiction and drug prevention modules as part of general overall education so that students have knowledge of it. At first this was provided in all schools in local drugs task force areas but it is now supposed to be in all schools nationally.

On the heroin side, there are 8,000 of 14,500 people in treatment. That, seemingly, is good by international standards but we would like there to be more in treatment.

According to the figures I gave earlier, there are approximately 400 people in prison on methadone. There was a bigger problem when the open door system in prisons was more evident and people were let out on unplanned temporary release.

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