Shift in political attitudes sees drug reform leave the fringes
So too, was any possibility we might set up a facility where heroin addicts could go and legally inject.
The latter is, apparently, on the brink of getting the green light by the Government, with the first supervised injecting room coming on stream next year.
The former is still a proposal — one that will not make any meaningful headway before the next election.
While the momentum towards a Portuguese-type model of decriminalisation of drug use could well dissipate with a changing administration, the fact that the Oireachtas justice committee has made the call is significant. Even more significant is that it received unanimous cross-party support. Members of the two governing parties — Fine Gael and Labour — were at the report launch and openly supported it.
And when the Irish Examiner later contacted committee members from Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin — Niall Collins and Pádraig MacLochlainn respectively — they both said they backed the recommendations.
It is the most dramatic reversal among political parties on, traditionally, a most sensitive issue — one that historians and PhD researchers will be better positioned to document.
The issue of decriminalisation was never anything other than a fringe issue in the Irish drug policy landscape — and was typically rejected out of hand by governments and ministers.
That began to change three years ago when Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign called for a debate on decriminalisation and, subsequently, advocated it. That was followed by calls from the Ana Liffey Drug Project for a supervised injecting centre for chaotic intravenous users.
All the while the international landscape was changing with the legalisation of cannabis in Colarado and Washington, as well as in Uruguay.
But it wasn’t until last April, and the appointment of Aodhán Ó Riordáin to the resurrected position of drugs strategy minister, that the seismic shift happened.
He pretty much immediately signalled a completely different approach to both of these issues, specifically taking on board and examining Ana Liffey’s injecting room proposal.
Then in June, a delegation from the justice committee visited Lisbon and examined the Portuguese system. Impressed by what they saw, they set up a review and called for public submissions and held hearings. Virtually all were in favour of a Portuguese-type model. Seasoned observers will wait to see what is in the election manifestos of the political parties — and, thereafter, the next programme for government.
Then it will be clear if the ‘paradigm shift’, as committee chair David Stanton TD described it, has taken root.
