Neasa Hourigan (Dublin Central, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for some of those facts and figures. I recognise that there has been a move by the Department to increase the access to naloxone. I would like to give the Minister of State an example of what it is like for service workers on the ground at the moment and how bizarre the current situation actually is. We have made naloxone available to workers. If I work in the drugs sector as a youth worker or in Merchants Quay Ireland, and if I know somebody who I think might go into overdose imminently and who is at a level of addiction where I believe that they have gone into overdose or will do so, I need to go to a GP and get a prescription for that person. If I then meet someone else who is in the middle of an overdose on the street in my work as a drug service worker, and decide to save their life by giving them naloxone, I must go back to the GP get a prescription for that, and get a new prescription for the other person who was to be the recipient of the original prescription.

Family members cannot get access to it at all. A person living with someone who is in addiction is desperately trying to keep their loved one alive but they cannot really access it. They can sign something to say that they - the family member - take drugs and therefore should get naloxone but they cannot access it on behalf of somebody else. This system does not lend itself to emergencies. Considering that it is a drug which has no impact on individuals who have not taken opioids, who might take it for no reason, and has effectively no street value, and all of the medical experts in the area and the service workers are telling us that they need freer access to naloxone, it should be prescription free. It seems like we should be the ones moving, as a Government, towards making that a reality. Approximately 70% of drug-related deaths are due to opioids. That is where naloxone is most effective. In general, research tells us that only four out of ten people who are experiencing overdose, die alone. That means that for six out of ten people somebody was there who could have saved their lives. We should be doing everything we can to stop drug deaths and naloxone is part of that.

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