Dominic Hannigan (Labour)

I congratulate the Minister of State on his new appointment. I thank the Progressive Democrats for tabling this motion. It is good to have a debate on the new national drugs strategy and I am pleased to have this opportunity to contribute to it. Many people were disappointed with the previous strategy. There has been a failure to implement many of its recommendations. It is for that reason that I wish to state my party will support the Fine Gael amendment to the motion.

We had an opportunity in recent months to debate the drugs problem and the national drugs strategy with the Minister of State's predecessor. I would like to reiterate a few points I have raised previously, mainly centring on harm reduction, the introduction of a modern approach to drug treatment and the control of diseases associated with drugs.

Dealing with drug addiction will be a pivotal part of the new strategy, but we cannot ignore the peripheral issues associated with drug addiction such as infection and homelessness. The spread of infectious diseases among drug users is a growing and dangerous problem facing us all. The Merchant's Quay Project has been at the forefront of drugs counselling in Dublin for almost 20 years. I read with interest its new submission on the new drugs strategy and once again it centres on the issue of harm reduction. It is still calling for a 24-hour needle exchange programme that can be expanded throughout the country, as was promised in the previous strategy but still has not been delivered. We need to revisit that issue and introduce one as soon as possible.

We know that 60% to 70% of intravenous drug users are infected with hepatitis C. There is no vaccine to prevent contracting it, but treatment is available in the form of drugs such as Interferon. Drug users, under the Merchant's Quay plan, access primary and mental health care where necessary. They also obtain clean paraphernalia and access to hepatitis C treatment. However, we also need to focus on promoting immunisation against other diseases such as hepatitis A and hepatitis B, the incidences of which are high among drug users.

We need to re-examine the issue of clinical treatment. Methadone is the drug of choice in terms of treatment, but often it is not effective. Some people cannot use it and some users react badly to it. Any treatment plan needs to move beyond the issue of the usage of methadone to include, perhaps, morphine and other substances.

The new drugs strategy needs to have a comprehensive picture of how to deal with the issue of homelessness and drug use. Ireland has a rapidly growing homeless population and we would all agree that the link between homelessness and drug addiction is undeniable. Homeless drug users have always proven to be the hardest people to help. It is estimated that 45% of Dublin's homeless population has a dependence in some form or other on drug use. A recent Merchant's Quay Project survey revealed that 93% of the drug addicts surveyed were homeless at some point and 63% of them were homeless at the time the survey was conducted.

Other sections of society still suffer from the ravages of hard drug use. Probably none is more ignored than our prison population. We can argue all night about how drugs get into our prisons. We should be able to find some way of preventing that, but the fact is there are drugs in our prisons. We have to deal with that issue and ensure prisoners are kept safe from potential infections. One way we can do that is to ensure there is an effective needle exchange programme in our prisons. A survey of drug users in prison in 1999 revealed that 21% — one in every five — of intravenous drug users first injected when they went to prison. Is there still no plan to introduce a needle exchange programme in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison? Such a programme is the single most effective way of combating disease and infection among addicts in prisons. We need to examine the introduction of such a programme in our prisons.

Switzerland was the first country to initiate a needle exchange programme in prisons in 1992. The prison staff quickly became supporters of it because they found they were working in a safer environment and the incidence of infection among inmates declined. In 1996 Germany introduced a needle exchange programme in three prisons initially and quickly extended it to a fourth prison when they recognised the success of the programme in those three prisons. However, there was a change of ideology which resulted in that programme being removed even though the prison staff were quite supportive of it. It is prison staff who are always the first to criticise the removal or cessation of needle exchange programmes within prisons. We need to examine that issue.

We must learn valuable lessons from aboard for our national drugs strategy in the area of harm reduction and also from projects in this country such as the Merchant's Quay Project. We need a comprehensive and nationwide needle exchange programme. We need to revise and rethink our attitude towards medical treatment. Importantly, we need to find a way of locating homeless people and ensuring drug use among that population is well categorised. We need to tackle that issue to ensure these people can become clean and have a new start in life.