Lynn Ruane (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The amendment relates to the language used and tries to make it much more inclusive of how people who use drugs like to frame themselves. It also moves slightly away from the idea that we need to strengthen laws instead of focusing on prevention. Much of the language in the motion is very much focused on strengthening the criminal law, which seems unusual in that we are also talking about removing some elements of the criminal law relating to drugs. In general, this is not how I would have written the motion but instead of completing rewriting it, I attempted to change some of the language.

Listening to the contributions of other speakers, I am conscious that it is hard to even begin to unpack the issues they addressed. Sometimes that is the problem. We are talking about drug dealing and people who use drugs in the same breath. We should not do that because if, when we speak about people who use drugs and services that need support, the discussion becomes wrapped up in criminal law and drug dealers, people become afraid to discuss decriminalisation or loosening up the law in any shape or form. We need to begin separating those two issues. One conversation is about how we tackle supply and provide the resources to do so. How we resource services and work with communities that are most affected by drug use is a separate matter.

I disagree with framing this discussion as one of drug use and drug addiction knowing no geographical space. That is not the case because it does. Addiction in more affluent communities looks very different from how it looks in less advantaged communities, as I am sure the Minister of State will agree. Of course addiction creeps into households in other communities, but it does not cause devastation in affluent communities in the way that it devastates our communities. It does not kill in the way that it kills in our communities. That is because problematic drug use in our communities is not about fun. It is not about snorting cocaine at the weekend, as previous speakers mentioned. It is about self-medicating the impacts of trauma, poverty, isolation, depression and other mental health issues, all the things that come from intergenerational poverty, lack of employment and lack of education. When those issues are matched with drug use, the outcome for a community is very different from what happens in other, more affluent places. What we have is a whole community where people are seeking to escape the reality of their lives.

Drug use and drug abuse are two different things. People have been taking mind-altering substances in some shape or form in every country in the world since the beginning of time. The "war on drugs" is a term we should not use because it is a war on people. Just Say No campaigns do not work. We must acknowledge that there are different types of drug users and that usage can affect people's lives in different ways. We must have the appropriate responses in place in each case.

I work in areas where people have been most devastated by drug abuse. Reference was made to the prevalence of ecstasy use but, in fact, a very small number of people have died as a result of using that drug. Heroin, benzodiazepines and those types of drugs cause many more deaths on a weekly basis. We need to get real in terms of how we unpack the conversation around the types of drugs and drug users. There has been talk about the potency of cannabis. The weed that is available now is more potent than the hash we used to buy in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a different substance in terms of its strength. However, it is neither accurate nor proven to say that it causes mental health issues. What we see is that most people, when they get to the stage where they start displaying mental health issues, begin to overuse weed to suppress those problems. It becomes a chicken and egg question of whether the mental health issues or the addiction issues came first.That is why we need to have only the conversation about dual-diagnosis care plans. We must not have a conversation about whether addiction or mental health issues came first because then the person never benefits from an adequate response to his or her situation. At that stage, does it really matter what came first? The person is presenting with two conditions, one being addiction at the other being mental health issues.

Let me outline what we need. I do not believe it falls under the Minister of State's remit. Rather, it comes under the remit of her colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Daly. We lost the co-ordinator for dual diagnosis two years ago. There was an interview but nobody else was put back into the position to address dual diagnosis. Has the position just evaporated? What are we doing? Are we recruiting somebody so we can move towards responding to mental health issues and addiction in a genuine way?

Senator Gavan mentioned the idea of grooming kids. I resist the implication a little because the same thing that creates problematic drug use in our communities is the same thing that creates drug dealing. It is inequality and an inability to succeed within one's own community and have what other people have. That is what attracts young people to drug dealing. The only research in this country on middle-ranking drug dealers was carried out by Dr. Fiona O'Reilly and me . Everybody is afraid to touch the subject. I do not understand why we are we not engaging in conversation with drug dealers. We keep talking about what we need to do to address the problem but nobody is actually having a conversation. Ten years ago, when we carried out the research, which is the only research still being referred to now, we met ten middle-ranking drug dealers. We framed them as middle-ranking because they were not heroin users. They were not opioid users so they were not selling and did not get into selling purely to feed their own habits. We wanted to rule such dealers out. We wanted to really understand the obstacles to exiting drug dealing, the advantages to beginning drug dealing and the attraction.

When we carried out the research, we discovered a theme. Some of the dealers used drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy recreationally but made a decent profit from drug dealing. The thread running through the research was that the dealers were 12 and 13 when they started. They were not groomed and certainly do not groom others, but younger siblings definitely end up getting involved. It almost becomes know as the way to make money. Some communities are literally operating on the back of funds that should be coming from the State but that are actually coming from a market we would prefer them not to come from. Various clubs and societies, including boxing clubs and football pitches, benefit. Jerseys may be purchased with the proceeds. One will find that we need to have a conversation. The entrepreneurial and business skills of drug dealers are skills on which we should be engaging. If in a few years we move towards a model based on legalisation, drug dealers should definitely be involved in the conversation.

We did not just survey the ten dealers; we spent considerable time with them. It emerged that they were 12 and 13 and when they started selling drugs. One said that when he started, he did not want to wear his brother's hand-me-downs anymore. I have circulated this research before. Another dealer said he did not want to have to eat cereal out of the sink anymore. He had a large number of brothers and sisters and there were not enough bowls in the house. Another said that all the houses that had money within his estate were getting Weatherglaze windows. This was before the council decided to upgrade. The individual said he wanted to try to save enough money because everybody on the road believed he was poor because he could not get Weatherglaze windows. He wanted to buy them for his mother. These were the reasons young men were deciding to start trying to make money. When they start, it keeps escalating. We use the word "gangland" as if it were something separate from us; it is not. Those concerned are our community members, family members and friends. They live in communities and estates. Their society is not separate from ours. We need to engage with them.

I support many aspects of this motion. I could talk about it for the next hour but I do not have time. We need to engage with drug dealers and stop being afraid of that. We can never move forward if we do not understand the root cause of engaging in drug dealing in the first instance.

I have one question for the Minister of State other than my question on dual diagnosis. It concerns something I believe will be crucial in moving more towards community involvement of the kind that has not occurred in the way we would like. It is not that there has been none at all but it has not occurred in a real way to a great enough extent. During this Government's term, we seem to have moved to a point where the HSE took over the role appointing co-ordinators to the task forces. The task forces have been excluded from the process of recruiting co-ordinators. This means that co-ordinators went from working for the task forces and community to working for the HSE. This put the role very much back towards the centre and caused a considerable amount of distrust among several task forces. Can we move back to a community model where the task force has responsibility for employing the co-ordinator, as was always the case? The co-ordinators now seem to believe they work for the HSE and not the task forces.