Irish Examiner view: Care rather than criminalisation

With people dying on our streets of overdoses through unsupervised injecting of drugs such as heroin, the introduction of medically supervised injection facilities, seems a natural, cost-effective way of treating the problem. Picture: iStock 

Ireland’s historical stance on drug abuse and addiction has generally mirrored that of the rest of the western world. That means we have criminalised and penalised a section of our community which has fallen into the grip of drugs, instead of trying to enlighten, embrace, and decriminalise thousands of victims.

In our modern society, drug use has become as habitualised and commonplace as our penchant for alcohol, but we have a lot still to learn about how to cope with the problems created by abuse of these substances.

While we have not been great either with the societal and domestic threat posed by alcohol abuse, that drinking is part of our social fabric makes it a different matter to drugs which, largely, are illegal.

Drugs are not legal in Portugal either, but that country has heretofore responded to the issues created by drug abuse in a rather more enlightened fashion than has been seen here.

In response to a public health crisis as a result of a HIV/Aids epidemic, with half of all cases directly attributable to the injection of drugs, when Portuguese authorities endeavoured to treat rather than criminalise addiction, there was a halving of overdose deaths and HIV infection rates.

With people dying on our streets of overdoses through unsupervised injecting of drugs such as heroin, the introduction of medically supervised injection facilities, seems a natural, cost-effective way of treating the problem, with huge benefits to both the State and those at risk.

Such facilities exist across Europe and have, largely, been hugely successful. Only one thus far has been granted planning permission in Dublin, and the scope for more in Cork, Limerick, Galway, and other Irish cities and towns is evident.

We cannot allow misguided ‘nimbyism’ to stymie enlightened and progressive means of fighting the threat posed to citizens by drug abuse, and the sooner we embrace positive change the better.