Ivana Bacik (Independent)

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I also welcome his measured approach and the fact he recognises the important need for a cross-departmental approach, which is recognised in the national drugs strategy. This is not just a matter of criminal justice or law enforcement issue. To see it in that light is to miss the point and not the way to go about changing the damage done by drugs.

We must be careful of our language when talking about drugs and take a rational approach. As the Minister of State said, it is important to maintain perspective when using the word "epidemic". There is certainly an epidemic of alcohol abuse and we would all agree with Senator White when she links that with suicide. We must be careful, however, about suggesting there is a drugs epidemic, because that suggests the need for a crisis response and short term measures. It also tends to lead to slogans and the introduction of measures such as minimum sentences, and to the sort of attack made on me the last time I spoke on this topic when certain Members on the Government side referred to me as being soft on drugs. That is a shame. It behoves us all to look rationally at the issue of drugs and seek credible measures to reduce the harm associated with drug abuse and, in particular, to reduce and prevent the tragic deaths arising from drug abuse.

Scaremongering will simply not work. As Senator Buttimer said, the people who put themselves at risk by taking drugs are not the people who listen to the slogans and messages. To tell people to just say "No", is not an effective way to prevent drug use. That is similar to asking people to abstain from sex in order to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases or HIV. That approach does not work. We need to look at a more rational approach, based on harm reduction and death prevention. This requires a credible message.

We need to treat addiction as a medical problem. In that regard, the HSE methadone programme is welcome, as is the greater commitment to drug rehabilitation. We do not yet have enough places available for drug rehabilitation, but we are slowly changing. One area in need of more resources is the drugs court. As somebody who has worked for some years in the criminal justice system, where I have been in the front line of defending offenders with serious opiate addiction problems, I have seen the terrible damage heroin addiction can do, not just to communities, but to individuals and their families. The drugs court could play an important role in encouraging and providing an incentive for rehabilitation.

I have also been associated for some time with the drug policy action group, which is a group of people who work in the area of drug rehabilitation and criminal justice and who have come together to try and promote a rational debate around drug policy and to explore alternative policy means to reduce the harm associated with drug abuse. The drug policy action group has stated that many of our existing drugs laws, particularly our criminal laws, tend to increase rather than reduce the harm associated with drug use, for drug users themselves and for the wider community. It suggests that the introduction of the criminal justice legislation, such as we have seen in recent years, and the increasing sentences and so on have not had any effective impact on reducing the supply of drugs.

A strong argument has been made by the policy action group which suggests that the over reliance on criminalisation has done great damage to the social fabric by creating a highly organised, profitable and tragically violence driven criminal black market in drugs. We have seen increasingly negative outcomes from the imprisonment of drug users and their criminalisation. I know of people who have become addicted to drugs while in prison, because of drug problems in our prisons.

We need to take a more rational approach to this issue. We need to look at measures that have been adopted elsewhere which are seen to have a more effective impact, for example, the issuing of leaflets outside nightclubs about the dangers associated with using ecstasy without drinking enough water. The Minister of State may remember that a number of years ago there were significant numbers of ecstasy related deaths, not just in Ireland. We should also look at the harm reduction measures used in other countries, including imaginative targeting of the people more at risk. This is a much more effective way to try and tackle the problem rather than creating longer sentences.

I urge the Minister of State to continue the work he is doing in terms of his cross-departmental approach and to take on board some of the suggestions of the drug policy action group. He should look again at the continued criminalisation of all the drugs currently illegal. There are arguments in favour of taking a different approach, in particular to cannabis. Already in our laws the penalties provided for possession and supply of cannabis are different from and less serious than those provided for other types of drugs. Perhaps we could consider taking a step further, as has been done in Britain, and downgrading cannabis. There is less harm associated with cannabis use than with opiate use.

The tragic deaths from cocaine should not obscure the fact that the greatest damage being done in our society by drug abuse is done from opiate addiction, which is associated with disadvantage in certain communities. Those are the communities that have suffered the most. It is also the tragic deaths in those families that have caused the most suffering. We owe it to these people to take a rational approach to drug abuse and to look again in a credible way at how to reduce the damage and risks associated with drug abuse.