Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As the Taoiseach knows, one of the biggest issues in areas of significant deprivation is the impact of drug addiction on individuals, families and communities. I have often heard Government spokespeople pay lip service to the idea that we need to move away from the criminal approach to dealing with this problem and take a health-related approach but, in fact, we have not done that at all. I wonder when we are going to realise that the so-called war on drugs is a disastrous failure and that we need to start to deal with this as a health issue. We cannot bemoan criminal activity if simultaneously the State effectively criminalises huge cohorts of our young population. That is what we are doing and the consequences are a total failure that particularly impacts on the most disadvantaged areas. When are we going to get serious policy change in that area?

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