Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

My apologies, I have just come from a committee so I am not going to take eight minutes but I will lay out some points. First, I pay tribute to Deputy Kenny. He has been the foremost voice in the Chamber since his arrival here in looking for a revised drug strategy from the Government. I would not question in anyway his bona fides, which stand large and tall, regarding his concern for those who have fallen into addiction and the need for them to receive rehabilitation and access to State support services to try to get them back playing a great role in society but also to stand them up and restore some dignity to their lives.

Drug addiction is a scourge and we have to be careful in terms of legislation that we are proposing as to whether or not we are potentially opening up avenues that might increase that vista rather than reduce it. Regarding the Bill, we have to listen to the members of the citizens' assembly who have looked at this. We want to decriminalise the possession particularly of class A drugs. I made the point to someone recently regarding the son of a family I know who was found in possession of a small amount of a drug at 18 years of age. I do not know why he ended up getting a conviction but he did and the problem after that was that he was quite good at sport and could not travel to the US because he was barred from getting a visa due to that conviction. Criminalising people for this is not the way forward and Government has probably made mention of that in recent days.

One of the big deficits we have in the country at present is how we deal with the social problems people are facing. We try to throw money at problems not really understanding how they come about. I am close to Aiséirí in Waterford and I commend the work that is done by that organisation. It sees many people who have, I would say, family trauma which is a road without a doubt into drug addiction. It is a societal problem which is very hard to get to the nub of. There are so many reasons for it but certainly impoverishment is one of the main ones as are a lack of access to education, mentoring and role models and that is why community groups and sports clubs are so important and why young people need to have something for which to aim. They need to have people in their lives who can give them direction and a sense of well-being, confidence and self-esteem to participate in life even if they have started from a very low base; I think we would all aspire to that.

Regarding where this legislation might go, there is a lot of medical evidence to suggest that cannabis and cannabis resin is not the drug it was 20 or 30 years ago. In my younger days, I lived in America for a while. I had two acquaintances there who started on cannabis in their late teens and one of those sadly died for heavy heroin addiction and the other has been battling a cocaine addiction for a number of years. Therefore, it can be a gateway drug but more importantly, the potency of cannabis has been highlighted by many members of the medical profession and we are seeing many more children in the psychiatric services who have psychosis and psychotic episodes as a result of using cannabis. It is not a benign drug by any means and neither, by the way, are prescription drugs which are abused and that is also a problem.

In the round, I congratulate Deputy Kenny on what he is trying to achieve here. We have to make this a public health issue. As has been said, this is a public health and not a criminal problem. We have a problem with drugs in that we have a lot of people who are making a lot of money out of the drug industry in this country and we have a lot of social deprivation because of drug addiction. I support anything that can be done to remediate this and to try to offer greater supports, particularly to those who are challenged in our community, either to keep them away from drugs, or where they happen to fall into that position, to try to get them off particularly hard drugs. We do not want to create addiction. Addiction is the greatest and cheapest marketing plan that any company anywhere could introduce and we need to make people aware of the dangers of it. I understand there are some people who want to and perhaps it is their right, certainly it is in other European countries, to dabble in class A drugs. It is not something I would chose to do but then I drink alcohol so who am I to talk? Therefore, I support Deputy Kenny and the work he is trying to do.

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