Rónán Mullen (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I raise an issue that Senator Colm Burke raised the other day that I think is very important. I am not sure whether a specific response was given, which can happen, and I apologise if I am mistaken. I refer to the emerging issue of the troubling over-prescribing of addictive and habit forming drugs. Those of us who have been to the United States have often noted and a been a little disturbed by the predatory way drugs are advertised on television. When we learned about the opioid crisis in America I must confess - perhaps due to an unconscious or accidental prejudice - that, frankly, I associated it with people who lived in trailer parks or were not discerning. Recently, I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is both fortunate and successful in life and who comes from a very successful family. He described how his mother had slipped into an addiction to prescription drugs and really struggled for a long time to be free of the problem, but even then I thought it was probably something that would not happen in more regulated and perhaps sensible European societies, yet, almost unknown to us, we have seen prescription drugs, by which I mean habit forming drugs, such as sleeping pills, pain relief tablets and anti-depressants being massively over-prescribed. Senator Colm Burke focused mainly on the financial dimension, but there is the much more significant human dimension of people becoming addicted. People are unaware of the trap because these are legal drugs. We are talking about people who seek medicines to treat their conditions. In 2016 President Trump described the American opioid crisis as a national emergency. Where are we at in Ireland? The number of prescriptions for one drug, Oxycodone, increased by 159% in the ten years from 2006 to 2016. It is the very drug that is behind the opioid crisis in America. It is a crisis that some say is killing up to 180 Americans a day, or perhaps a minimum of 100. We need to examine closely the over-prescription of drugs in this country. Dr. Emmet Curran, president of the National Association of General Practitioners, has said there is definitely over-prescribing. As we have all seen what has happened in America, we cannot be complacent. There is a money dimension. Dr. Shari McDaid from the organisation Mental Health Reform has claimed there is a lack of talk therapy at all levels of the mental health service. Loneliness in our society is another dimension about which we need to talk as part of our discussion on the issue. I would be grateful, when it is convenient for him to do so, if we could hear from the Minister for Health what is being done to identify the extent of the problem and the way it is going to develop, what has happened and what will happen into the future and how we are going to tackle what is an emerging problem.