Far from addressing this evil, drugs war only incubates the problem
He even hinted at the provision of consumption rooms where addicts could shoot up in sterile conditions.
If there was such a proposal, he said, “I would not be fighting against it.”
Often there is a very fine line between bravery and stupidity. Minister for Justice Michael McDowell described the suggestion as a “recipe for disaster”.
Most people are terrified of the drug problem and they have little sympathy for anyone in jail for drug offences. The justification for the measure was that 90% of injecting drug users in prison are infected with hepatitis C, a potentially fatal liver disease.
Providing clean needles would at least give the other 10% a chance of avoiding the disease and provide a measure of containment. Any society that allows a disease such as hepatitis C to spread with impunity, even among the so-called underclass, is courting disaster.
As the Minister of State responsible for the National Drug Strategy, Noel Ahern deserves credit for having the guts to speak out on behalf of that tiny vulnerable minority.
His remarks generated plenty of sound and fury, but little enlightenment. The Minister for Justice responded with all the understanding of an agitated rottweiller.
“I have responsibility for running the prisons and for implementing the Programme for Government which is predicated on a wholly different approach to drugs in prisons,” the Minister for Justice snapped. Ouch!
Translated, his response amounted to a public rebuke of the Taoiseach’s brother, who was essentially told to butt out and mind his own business. McDowell insisted that he was not “rapping anyone over the knuckles”.
No, it was more like a gratuitous kick in the groin for having the nerve to make such a suggestion.
John O’Donoghue sold us a pup when he promised to implement a policy of zero-tolerance in relation to drugs in 1997.
Now Michael McDowell is trying to sell the same pup again. If tough talk could solve the problem, it would have been resolved years ago.
Politicians all over the world promised to crack down on drug dealing, but all have failed, some more spectacularly than others. They have been waging “war” on drug-dealing in the United States for decades, but the problem is as bad if not worse than ever.
Between 1980 and the turn of the millennium, the Americans spent over $330 billion in fighting the drug scourge. We don’t have that kind of money, but even if we did, it would be absolutely crazy to emulate the US. Yet that is what we’ve been doing with the same talk and the same failed policies. Those have been breeding crime, undermining the police, filling our jails, and fostering gangs which have been becoming more sophisticated and ruthless as they branch out into other criminal activities.
This is no longer just a Dublin problem; there are now more than 2,200 addicts outside of the capital. In a study funded by the Regional Drugs Task Force and the Midlands Health Board Dr Niall McElwee stated earlier this month that there are 300 heroin users in Athlone and some 200 in Portlaoise.
Girls as young as 15 have become addicted and are prostituting themselves in Dublin in order to feed their habits. They have to pay extortionate prices. An addict has to pay around €100 a day.
Ten years ago it cost £150 a day, and the price is the surest sign that society is losing the battle, because it means that heroin is more readily available.
Most addicts cannot afford the €100 a day but, as slaves to the drug, they have to get it somehow. Some resort to prostitution and others to stealing, but the surest way is to sell heroin. As a result, this social blight is spreading on the same principle as pyramid selling.
As long as drug dealers can make enormous profits there will always be people to push drugs. They can make more money in a few hours of drug trafficking than they could make in years of honest toil. Following his release from prison in late 1993 until his arrest in 1996 after Veronica Guerin’s murder, John Gilligan amassed a fortune of over £15 million from drug dealing.
Of course, he is in jail now, but even if all the known drug barons were with him, others would inevitably be prepared to take chances while so much money is available.
This is not really about those foolish people who dabble in drugs and end up with a drug dependency. It is about incubating a frightening range of social evils that are blighting our society. Many of the victims are vulnerable children who do not know any better. We have been witnessing the modern equivalent of a Charles Dickens novel where children are being hooked and forced into prostitution, or used to steal. Ultimately society as a whole becomes the victim.
THIS week there was the frightening spectacle of a report indicating that gardaí in Limerick are living in fear. Nobody should be surprised. In June a doctor who treats patients in the O’Malley Park Estate said that a gang that has been terrorising women in their own homes.
The drugs phenomenon has been fostering the gang culture and this has had its manifestations in the rapes in the O’Malley Park area.
“In the past eight months there has been eight rapes that I can think of,” the doctor said. “None of the victims are willing to report the rape to gardaí, because they are terrified of what the gang will do to them if they do.” The victims range in age from a 12-year-old to pensioners. The doctor cannot compel them to report the crimes, nor can he report them himself because he is bound by professional confidentiality, but he has no doubt that the rapes occurred.
“I know it’s true because I examined them,” he insisted.
To tackle the overall drug problem, it is necessary to adopt a different approach - to eliminate the profits. If addicts were allowed to buy heroin legally on prescription, it would take the profit out of the drug, because the pushers would never be able to sell it as cheaply. This would not condone drug addiction but would merely recognise those people as ill and provide them with the necessary drug under controlled conditions, just as a diabetic is allowed to buy insulin.
Channelling addicts into such controlled conditions would not only help curb the spread of AIDS and hepatitis C, it would also improve the chances of persuading addicts to seek the necessary professional help to kick their habit. Some of the money currently being squandered on the ineffective policies could then be put into drug treatment. At present we have the intolerable situation of waiting lists for people to get on a methadone programme.
If addicts’ dependency on their dealers were broken, the gardaí would have a better chance of getting the evidence to put the drug barons behind bars.
It would also free up our jails to make room for real criminals, rather than for people who are really the victims of their own initial ignorance, compounded by the collective stupidity of society in failing to face up to the malignancy of this problem.
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