Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Clearly the drugs mentioned in the Bill can be dangerous. The question here is whether criminalising possession or use of those drugs will really do anything to help the situation that confronts us. There have been many examples in many other countries of similar attempts to criminalise drugs of this kind and general character. Recently in the United States there has been a major crackdown on prescription opiates. OxyContin is an example of one of the drugs targeted in this crackdown. The result has not been a decline in drug use: it has fuelled the fires of a major heroin epidemic because it is now cheaper to access heroin and easier to get one's hands on it than some of the prescription opiates that have been cracked down on. Heroin deaths in the US have increased threefold since 2010. What started that off was a crackdown on prescription opiates in Florida. At one stage, 90% of prescription opiates were sold from a Florida base. The Guardiansaid of this situation: "Doctors also reported an increase in the number of babies born addicted to heroin, and Florida leads the US in new HIV-Aids infections" and "The National Institute on Drug Abuse declared a heroin epidemic in south Florida two years ago." That has been the experience in the United States.

The drugs it is being proposed to ban here are so-called Z drugs or downer drugs. Heroin is a downer drug. Action on the proposals in this Bill would create a serious possibility of a big increase in the heroin trade flowing from such a crackdown. Flowing from that we would see more deaths in the middle of what is already fast becoming a HIV outbreak in this country. The prohibition of designer drugs is resulting in the development of new designer drugs - different cocktails and combinations to circumvent the law and controls that are there at the moment. It gets good headlines in the newspapers and looks good for Government and politicians. Action is being taken in the war on drugs but it has very little or no effect on the ground in terms of solving the problems faced by communities and people in their lives and in some cases makes the situation worse.

The so-called war on drugs has failed in Ireland and internationally. It is incontrovertible at this stage - all the evidence points towards that. The real choice is one between what we have in this State - uncontrolled availability of drugs, controlled by gangsters - and the alternative - a controlled availability of drugs in the hands of the State linked to properly funded harm reduction programmes. They are the alternatives and choice that society has. Let us look at the alternative in a practical sense. Deputy Jonathan O'Brien mentioned the example of Portugal. In Portugal the use and possession of illicit drugs for personal use is no longer a criminal offence resulting in a prison sentence provided one is found in possession of no more than a ten day supply. It is now an administrative offence in the same way as a parking fine or something of that nature. There has been talk in the debate of an evidence based approach. What is the evidence from Portugal about the use of that model? I will give a statistic and information which should be central to this debate. There are now three overdose deaths per 1 million citizens in Portugal. That compares with the EU average of 17.3 overdose deaths per million citizens. Portugal has the second lowest rate in the European Union. How does that compare with the Republic of Ireland? The latest figures I have, which are from 2012, show 70 overdose deaths per million citizens compared to three in Portugal and 17.3 in the EU. Those are damning statistics. They are not just statistics; they are people's lives we are talking about here. What is the best approach to tackling this issue? There have been some welcome signs of the potential for a change in policy in this State in recent times. The example has been given of the all-party Oireachtas committee which, towards the end of the lifetime of the last Dáil, recommended that drug possession be dealt with by means of a civil response rather than through the criminal justice system. There is a second misuse of drugs Bill due to come before us in the autumn which will put on the agenda the idea of injection rooms for heroin addicts and which will deal with heroin addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal or justice one.

Recently, the new Minister, Deputy Harris, stated, "the Government intends to deliver on the commitment in the programme for Government to having a health-led rather than a criminal justice approach to drugs use". He further stated:

There is significant debate, both nationally and internationally, on the issue of decriminalisation and-or alternative approaches to the current criminal justice approach to the simple possession of small quantities of illegal drugs for personal use. The issue is also live here as part of the ongoing discussions on the drafting of a new national drugs strategy.

Those examples, the recommendations of the Oireachtas committee, the Bill due to come before us in the autumn and the quote from the Minister are all encouraging signs but they are in complete contradiction to the approach being signalled by the Government in this Act. The Government is facing both ways. There is the United States-style war on drugs approach on the one hand or the Portuguese approach on the other. We cannot face in two directions at the one time. We cannot have both. We must choose. With this Bill the Government is taking the wrong choice. It has been clearly proven by example, in this country and elsewhere, that it is the wrong choice.

I recently came across a phrase which commanded my attention: "austerity drugs". I came across it in the following context. Members will think I am a reader of The Guardianalthough I do not read that newspaper as often as one might think. In any case, this is another quote from The Guardiannewspaper from recent times. It states:

Greece's infamous new drug, sisa, is basically meth and filler ingredients like battery acid, engine oil, shampoo, and cooking salt. The majority of its users are poor, often homeless, city dwellers reeling from the psychological and physical impacts of a country in the grip of economic collapse.

Some of these drugs cost €2 or less a hit. According to The Guardiannewspaper:

For Charalampos Poulopoulos, the head of Kethea, Greece's pre-eminent anti-drug centre, sisa symbolises the depredations of a crisis that has spawned record levels of destitution and unemployment. It is, he said, an "austerity drug" – the best response yet of dealers who have become ever more adept at producing synthetic drugs designed for those who can no longer afford more expensive highs from such drugs as heroin and cocaine.

The point that is being made in that report is that interrupting the supply of drugs will have a certain effect in the short term but it will not have a medium-term or long-term effect, get to the root of the issue or be effective. Therefore, the answer rests not on the supply side but on the demand side.

We need to reduce the demand. There are many ways of doing that, but a key central way of doing so is by tackling the poverty, unemployment and austerity which make so many people, especially but not exclusively the young, want to escape the reality of their daily lives through the medium of drugs. To do that, to tackle poverty, unemployment and austerity seriously, we must tackle the root cause, which is the system of capital that causes it and which puts profit before ordinary people, and replace it with a genuinely human society which places solidarity among people ahead of the rat race of a profit system - a genuinely democratic and socialist society.

See this speech in context