Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent Ireland Party)

Nobody wants to see people with addiction punished while the dealers get rich. In Limerick, Sr. Concilio in Cuan Mhuire has done an amazing job trying to help people with addiction. The centre has opened a farm and a garden centre to reintroduce people into the workplace. She has done brilliant work. A former hurler from Limerick, Ciaran Carey, has counselling services doing the same, using people who have suffered from addictions themselves, because they know what they talking about. We see people doing all this great work and then we are talking about punishing people who have addictions and we are letting the dealers go free. They go free because they are able to get the drugs into this country, the same way as food can be imported. There is nothing stopping them coming in. We need to try something different. I believe Portugal has tried something slightly different. There, certain drugs have been legalised in a controlled way. Here, it was shown that people who were suffering from serious illnesses could be helped by medicinal cannabis after every other drug had been tried. In some cases, the only thing that actually worked was medicinal cannabis to give that person a quality of life. Under tight legislation and under tight laws, I would like to see those people have a quality of life if that is the only quality of life that is there, if the other drugs are not there to help them. We have legalised drugs in this country through our chemists and others, which are prescribed drugs for people. If none of them works and the medicinal cannabis does work for people to give them a quality of life, I would be for that, as long as it is legislated for tightly and controlled. We should look at the Portugese model. If we take control away from the dealers, we might actually halve the problem. Something has to be done differently. All we are doing at the moment is punishing people who are addicted. Recently, Deputy Conor Sheehan said that Limerick was the cocaine capital of Ireland. It is not.

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