Rooms for heroin users a first step

Minister of State Noel Ahern, who has special responsible for the government’s drugs strategy, is seriously considering the possibility of providing consumption rooms for heroine addicts, following discussions with his German counterpart.

The rooms would provide a safe environment for addicts where the quality of their heroine could be tested to insure that it is not contaminated.

The proposal is obviously at a very early stage and amounts to a kind of political trial balloon, but the minister deserves credit for having the courage to address the thorny and extremely emotive issue. Of course, this government has never been short of ideas, but it has frequently lacked the leadership, or the courage and conviction to go through with the ideas expressed.

What the Minister of State calls consumption rooms are likely to be categorised as shooting galleries by opponents, who will seek to trivialise his views by ridiculing them. We need a meaningful debate because this is a problem that needs to be tackled.

The film on the life and untimely death of Veronica Guerin has again highlighted the need to tackle the drug issue with more than mere rhetoric.

Most people find addicts loitering about the streets very intimidating.

Mr Ahern therefore plans to go to see how the consumption rooms function in Germany. They are still just at an experimental stage, but he emphasised that he thinks such rooms would only be a temporary measure, which could be used to persuade the addicts to look for help in order to kick the heroine habit.

The Minister of State was at pains to stress that this would be a long way short of legalisation, much less providing free heroine to addicts, which was advocated last week by Dr Mick Molloy, a former President of the Irish Medical Organisation.

If we went down that road it might create more problems that it would solve. What we must face now, however, is that we already have a growing drug problem. This country currently tops the European league in the consumption of amphetamines and ecstasy.

People are injecting heroine on the streets of Dublin. There was a controversy recently over photographs published in the national press of addicts injecting heroine on the street with gardaí in the background.

The gardaí are being hamstrung because they have no place to put the addicts. Over 40% of the people in our jails have a history of injecting drugs. And we have been witnessing a kind of head in the sand approach on the part of our authorities.

Last month four prison officers, with connections to a criminal family, were arrested for trafficking in drugs. The latest drug figures for this country go back to 1998, which means that they are almost five years out of date.

When the Irish Examiner sought information about drug seizures and attempted suicides in Irish prisons, the response was that this information would be so difficult to compile to that it would cost almost 10,000.

The first step in solving any problem is to recognise that the problem exists, but some of our authorities seem more intend on hiding that problem. Thus, if it is only for highlighting the issue, Noel Ahern deserves credit.