Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

The Bill is not premature; it is way overdue. The majority of people in Irish society, of young people, know that that is the case. In any event, we will move on and debate some of the issues here.

We are debating a very modest proposal, which is to decriminalise possession of cannabis for personal use. We are talking about small amounts. The Bill stipulates 7 g of cannabis or 2.5 g of cannabis resin. The average joint would be in and around half a gram. This gives the House an idea of what we are talking about.

I will repeat a point raised in the debate earlier, which is that in 2022, there were 12,136 recorded offences for possession of an illicit drug for personal use, which constituted 70% of all drug offences. For a large number of those offences which related to cannabis possession, let us think a little bit about what has happened here. First, when a person comes before the court and is found guilty under the Misuse of Drugs Act, the normal thing would not be a conviction straight off the bat. Most judges on most days will ask for a donation to be made to the charity box. What would this donation be? Donations are not small and could be €400 or €500, which would be a week's take-home pay for many young workers. You avoid a criminal record if you are prepared to cough up the bobs. You might not be so lucky if you had bought and shared the drug with other people, for example, even if you shared the drug with your partner. There was a court case related to that recently. Certainly, if you had bought what was not a large quantity of the drug but you had given or sold it to your friends, not as a big time drug dealer or anything like that, on a given day a judge might consider that in a more serious light and might convict.

What does a conviction mean for people in that situation? For one thing, it will certainly affect their employment prospects. There are many companies that simply are not going to hire you. No way. It can affect someone’s chances of travel and to get a visa to travel to another country. I will give one example that is nearby. In the Gallery today, we have Martin from Cork. Martin campaigns for sensible drug policy and for the legalisation of cannabis. He would be seen as an authoritative spokesperson for that point of view. As such, he was to attend the United Nations special assembly on narcotics in 2016. He could not do it. Why? Because he could not get a visa to get into the United States because of the drugs conviction he had because of our antiquated laws. And that is before I even talk about the effect a conviction might have on the mental health of a person.

What happens before a person ends up in the court? He or she has been stopped and searched. We do not know how many people have been stopped and searched in any given year. The Garda does not make a log of all the searches that take place. The Central Statistics Office has criticised the quality of the data that the Garda has in these instances. Receipts are issued but only when drugs are found, so how many stop and searches do we have in this State in any given year? If in excess of 12,000 people is the number of recorded offences, there will have been plenty of stop and searches where no drugs were found or were to be found. If, for example, there are two searches for every one that becomes a recorded offence, that would be 24,000 stop and searches. If there are three, it would be 36,000; and if there are five, then there would be 60,000 searches. I cannot back up this up with statistics, because the Garda does not provide the statistics, but I know it to be the case that a disproportionate number of people of colour are stopped and searched, particularly young people, as are a disproportionate number of people from lower-income working-class areas. This has to be part of the debate. There is no comparison with the numbers of stopping and searching that goes on in middle-class areas, including middle-class areas that might not be too far away.

How much Garda time and how much of the State's resources are spent with this nonsensical around-the-mulberry-bush game? The garda has to stop the person and search the person. The garda has to go back to the station and do the paperwork. When the file comes back from the DPP, there is more paperwork to be done. The garda has to send out correspondence, which might be a registered letter or it could be calling to the home and delivering and if the person is not there, the garda might have to call a second time. That is before we even look at the court time. The idea that a garda steps into a court at 10 a.m., the case is heard and he is out the gap by 10.30 a.m. might happen but I would say it is rare enough. It would be quite common to spend a morning in court and not uncommon to spend a day in court. You might want to argue that those resources stay with the Garda but I think that if you had community control over the Garda, that is, democratic control over the Garda by communities, they would get rid of that nonsense and say there are far more valuable things the Garda could be doing to provide a service in their community. If you wanted the resources not to be with the Garda but to be with the State, what could be done on investment in mental health services, youth workers and social workers with the money and time that is wasted in that exercise?

I deliberately have not gone into medicinal arguments too much because the arguments are broader than that. The medicinal arguments are still very much part of this debate, however. In a district court in west Cork earlier this year a 64 year old man, a multiple cancer survivor who had experienced organ failure and had both hips and a knee replaced and who had suffered a stroke came in front of the court for growing cannabis and possession of cannabis. At one stage this man had been 13 stone or 14 stone. Because of the illnesses he was down to 7 stone at one point. A person he knew gave him some cannabis. They told him it would give him the munchies and get his weight back up. He tried it one night and woke up in the middle of the night. He said he was hungry enough to eat a horse. The weight went back up. It was a very useful thing for that person. The man was fined €300. He was given a three-month suspended sentence and subject to random testing, I stand to be corrected, but I think for the next three years. It is certainly for a significant time. In other words, if he uses cannabis again, he is off to jail. We have Ministers coming in here saying that the State needs to take a health-led approach but that is what is going on while these clichés are being trotted out.

The war on drugs has not worked. It is a complete failure. We need to legalise and have democratic control over drugs supply. We need to legalise cannabis. The people who argue against it say it is a gateway drug and if you start taking cannabis you will be onto heroin and who-knows-what next. There is no medical argument to back that up but there is a social argument. You buy your cannabis from your drug dealer. He sells it to you this week or this month; next year, he asks would you like to try something else. It is the Government’s policy and the State’s policy which makes cannabis a gateway drug. This is an important issue. It should not be kicked down the road. We should vote for this to go ahead tonight.

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