Not everyone is embracing ‘Hugs and Drugs’ minister
The fact the Coalition did not appoint a minister with special responsibility for drugs policy for four years tells you all you need to know about how seriously they take the issue.
But Mr Ó Ríordáin, who also covers equality issues — the huggy part of his job — has certainly attempted to move fast to make up the lost time since being appointed to the role in May.
Far from trotting out the tired old cliches about a so-called war on drugs, Mr Ó Ríordáin has called for a new approach whereby Ireland would follow Portugal’s largely successful move to decriminalise all drugs from crack to weed.
Decriminalisation is not the same as legalisation as while it allows people the freedom to use small amounts of drugs for personal use, supplying the drugs is still a criminal offence.
Portugal changed course in 2001 because the country’s previous hardline stance left it with 100,000 heroin addicts and the EU’s highest HIV infection rate from needle-sharing. By switching resources away from prosecuting and jailing addicts and pumping them into rehab programmes instead, the number of people in drug treatment more than doubled, and the number of heroin-related deaths halved by 2009.
Mr Ó Ríordáin realizes that it will be many years, if ever, before Ireland goes down the Portuguese route, but at least he has started an adult conversation about the implications.
His first major practical step as minister is to seek Cabinet approval for “injection rooms” where addicts will be able to go to take drugs in a safe, medically-supervised environment, rather than shoot up in back alleyways and parks.
Critics will say it legitimises their law-breaking, but the reality of the situation is they are going to do it anyway, and they will do less harm to themselves — and non-drug users in the parks, or playgrounds, or wherever — if they are in a controlled environment.
Some 80 such centres already exist across Europe, and the one in Sydney has had particular success as more than 12,000 addicts have registered with it since 2001, and of those, 8,500 have gone on to treatment and rehab programmes.
Of course, some would like to see the “junkies” shoot up and, perhaps, die in seedy alleyways, out of the way, rather than “compromise” the State’s stance in the unwinnable “war” on drugs.
But then there has always been hypocrisy about which drugs we ban and which we indulge. Why ban say heroin, and not nicotine, just because one can kill you faster?
Some 6,000 people a year die from tobacco-related illnesses in this country — and they pay the Government €1.47bn for the privilege via taxes and duties. But, unfortunately, this does not even cover the estimated €2bn a year smokers cost the health service.
And that is before we have even mentioned Ireland’s mass addiction to booze.
Britain’s former “drugs czar”, the brilliantly named Prof David Nutt, argued in 2010 that if people were treated as adults and given the real facts about harmful substances, they were far less likely to indulge in them as he railed against the “artificial” separation of tobacco and alcohol from illegal drugs as being counter-productive.
Prof Nutt argued that the use of cannabis and ecstasy was less harmful than heavy smoking or drinking, indeed he pointed out that as E use killed 30 people a year in the UK, while horse riding killed 100 people a year, why not ban horse riding?
For this he was immediately sacked by the then Labour government, and four years later it was same story of panic when the Tory/Lib Dem coalition rubbished a major study it itself had commissioned because it recommended a major change in the direction of drugs policy.
The study, set up by the British home office, declared: “There is no apparent correlation between the ‘toughness’ of a country’s approach and the prevalence of....drugs use.” British PM David Cameron immediately moved to bury the report, just like he tried to bury all those awkward questions when he was running for the Tory leadership in 2005 as to whether he had ever taken cocaine.
Mr Cameron would only stick to the, ahem, line that he had never done so while a member of parliament.
Another politician who got funny on drugs was everyone’s favourite war-monger George W Bush who used the same Cameronesque vagueness during the 2000 US presidential election campaign, when he would only say he had not taken cocaine in the past 15 years, insisting that, as this was the requirement for all federal employees, he need not elaborate further.
W went on to nose ahead in Florida (or did he?) and the Republican-stacked US supreme court declared him the presidential winner. But maybe his “victory” might have been clearer if it had not emerged in the dying days of the campaign that he forgot to tell voters about a drink-driving conviction.
Mr Cameron’s close chum and very likely successor as prime minister in 2017, George Osborne, was forced to deny claims from dominatrix, Natalie Rowe, that he snorted a “big fat line of cocaine” in front of her.
Mr Osborne then dismissed a 1994 picture of him with his arm around Rowe — who ran the Black Beauties escort agency, which charged clients £350 for S&M sex — behind a table dusted with white powder by insisting he was innocent and would not be “distracted” from reforming the banking sector.
But media interest was so intense that one wag at the British treasury’s press office started answering the phone to journalists by asking whether the call was concerned with “spanking or banking?” Such delusional, detached and disinterested politicians represent the politics of failure on drugs.
Minister Ó Ríordáin, whose only brush with drugs appears to be a long ago weekend in Amsterdam, represents the enlightened realism of the future which actually might bring real, positive, change.
