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

I commend Deputy Gino Kenny on his leadership on this critical issue in our society. The lack of leadership and courage on the part of the Government is depressing. Yet again, it wants to kick down the road a key issue of social change and the recognition of social reality, instead of doing the right thing. This is especially the case given the citizens' assembly has made the recommendations.

On the wider issue, we are clear about this and straight up. We believe in the legalisation and regulation of drugs because we think criminalisation has failed disastrously. It has done far more damage to our society than would legalising and regulating drugs properly, and it is doing it every day. It is criminalising huge numbers of young people, effectively whole generations of young people, and doing particular damage to some of the poorest and most deprived communities and to people who are medically vulnerable, such as people with mental health issues and so on. It is doing extraordinary damage and, critically, it has spawned a massive, violent criminal underground that is a direct result of criminalisation. It is so obvious that if we criminalise something that huge numbers of our population do, whether we like that thing or not, at a stroke all those people will become criminals. Some of them will end up in court or in prison, taking up enormous volumes of police and court resources. Even those who do not end up in court are operating in a criminal underworld, vulnerable to the criminals who run it, and all that goes with that.

I do not know what the Government is going to say in response to this. No doubt, it will say there can be negative consequences of drug use, such as addiction, impacts on mental health and so on. I do not claim to be an expert, but I do not think there is a single point the Government could make about the adverse negative impacts of cannabis use that it could not say ten times over about alcohol use, which does far more damage to our society. It would be a foolish government indeed that thought the answer to the problems of alcohol abuse, whether violence, domestic abuse or addiction, was to criminalise it. Of course, that was tried and it was a disaster. It led directly to the growth of the Mafia and the criminal underworld in the United States, for which the United States is still paying a very bitter price.

Indeed, whatever we may think about it, criminalisation glamorises drug use as being part of a sort of mysterious criminal underworld. It is directly counterproductive. Even if your objective is to reduce drug use - certainly, all of us have the objective of reducing drug harm and addiction - it is directly counterproductive. It makes the situation far worse. It stigmatises people, and it leaves people with criminal records that impact on the rest of their lives in many cases, limits their life choices and so on. Indeed, we could say many of the same things about prescription drugs, which are regulated. It makes no sense whatsoever, and the Government should cop on, show a bit of moral political leadership and allow this very modest Bill.

We hope we can also open up the wider debate. The strategy of criminalisation and, frankly, of political cowardice has been a disastrous failure. Working-class areas, in particular although not exclusively, have paid a bitter price for the criminalisation approach this Government and previous Governments have followed. It has to end. The Government has to wake up to reality.

See this speech in context