David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have spoken on this subject many times over the past 30 years so I will not rehash everything I have said. It is there on the record if anybody wants to be bothered looking at it. When I started talking about these issues I was a lone voice. It is interesting that, in the past number of years, it has been taken up by a number of professionals such as legal people, medical people and, most significantly now, very senior police officers all over Europe. We need to listen to these voices.

People seem to think that drugs have always been outlawed but this is not the case at all. They were only outlawed in the 20th century. Victorian ladies regularly took laudanum in their drawing rooms and lots of them smoked joints. It was actually the drugs companies which launched the campaign to criminalise drugs as they were not getting a profit from them. We need a historical perspective and to take into account the fact that, in increasing volume, many professionals are now saying that this approach was wrong. It has wasted huge amounts of police resources and money but resulted only in an increase in the price of drugs. The drugs barons, of course, welcomed this as their profits went up but that is all it has succeeded in doing and that is a tragedy. It is sad that so many people, particularly young people, seek relief from reality, a reality which is unattractive to them and from which they want to escape. That is a pity but we have to address the situation with honesty and realism rather than with a cloud cuckoo land total ban on everything. We need to be subtle and sophisticated in the way we approach the subject and I strongly support the amendments.