Aodhán Ó Ríordáin (Labour) | Oireachtas source

There are very few issues in public policy that I feel more strongly about than this. I was in the position of the Minister of State not that long ago. In public life, it is very rare to come to the conclusion that everything we are doing is wrong. We have come to the conclusion that the issue with drugs lies with the substances and that if we just control them, everything will be fine. Addition, however, is not just about the substance, it is about circumstances, disconnection and marginalisation. For the life of me, I cannot understand why we still think it is a good idea to effectively criminalise marginalisation and addiction.What my amendment is trying to achieve - it is very similar to Senator Ruane's amendment - is to stand by what the programme for Government said that drug policy would take a health-centred approach and not a criminal justice one. It makes absolutely no sense to try to dissuade somebody from a life of addiction by criminalising him or her for his or her drug use. My amendment clearly states that it should be a defence for anybody caught in possession of an illegal substance to argue that it was for his or her own personal use. As Senator Ruane has quite correctly said, Ireland could follow the example of Portugal by saying to individuals that we understand they are addicted, they have a medical need and that they need help and compassion and that we are not going to blame the victim. What happens in this Republic is that we blame the victim and all the resources that could be spent dealing with the pushers and the trade are being spent on the victims of the trade.

There are silent victims of this industry who nobody ever hears about. I mentioned in the House a couple of weeks ago that in March of this year two people were found dead on the streets of our capital city from heroin overdoses but that never made it into the newspapers. One gentleman was found dead in the public toilet of Connolly Station and another gentleman was found dead after two nights in the open air in Foley Street. The stories did not make it into any newspaper, there was no protest and there was no political comment about it because on some level, in this society, we have decided that these people are to blame for their own addiction. We blame the victim and criminalise the victim.

If one speaks to any group from the equality sector, whether the LGBT community, the Traveller community, people with disabilities or migrants, they will all say that there is disproportionate drug usage issue in these communities because of disconnection and marginalisation. When a person falls into addiction, surely our response should not be a criminal justice one but a health one. I am not sure if the Minister of State has been to the Drug Treatment Court, which is an initiative to try to keep people away from the criminal justice system, but all one sees there is a bunch of sick people sitting in a court room. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Fundamentally, what we are trying to achieve here is to ensure the victim of this trade, the addict or the drug user, is not a criminal because of his or her drug use. The people who sell, trade in and profit from drugs should be criminalised. They should be taken out of circulation and we should use the criminal justice system to do that. However, the victim, the addict or the user, should not be criminalised because of his or her medical need or medical condition. What we propose is common sense. It would shift the whole drugs issue away from a moralising pathetic attempt to say Ireland is black and white to actually humanise the individual who is affected by this.

I refer to our friends in the media. We, in Ireland, constantly use terminology that dehumanises people who need services and resources, and the media is culpable in this. We call them names; we call them junk. When we do that it inevitably results in the public consciousness believing that, in some way, these people are less worthy of resources. Let us take a course of action that might actually work because what we are doing at the moment is not working. We should look at what they do in Portugal and we should say to citizens that they have an addiction and they are not criminals but that they are patients with a medical need and we will treat them as such.