Ireland looks set to adopt a more progressive approach to addressing drug addiction.
Starting next year, supervised injection rooms will likely be available to drug users in Dublin, and possibly later in other Irish cities, including Cork, Galway, and Limerick, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, the minister in charge of the nation’s drugs strategy, said at a London School of Economics forum workshop on Monday (Nov. 2).
Ríordáin, a member of Ireland’s Labour Party, is so confident the cabinet will agree later this month to legislate for the provision of such centers that the plan was floated before his speech. Ríordáin explained the plan further on Monday, saying:
A medically supervised injecting centre is not a ‘free for all’ for those who wish to inject drugs; it is a clinical, controlled environment which aims to engage a hard to reach population of drug user and provide defined pathways to higher threshold treatment services such as medical and social interventions and counselling services.
Decades of evidence show that treatment is more effective than criminalization in tackling substance abuse, professor Catherine Comiskey of Trinity College Dublin, chairperson of the National Advisory Committee on Drugs and Alcohol, said in the Irish Times.
Ríordáin also indicated on Monday that he is in favor of decriminalizing people who are found in possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use, and he expressed optimism that Ireland’s Oireachtas Justice Committee would recommend a decriminalization policy similar to that in operation in Portugal.
He added that he expects his party to campaign for the decriminalization of drug use in the next general election, but he suggested that, even if the proposal wins broad support, it could take years to implement:
“I think if we’re going to introduce decriminalisation in Ireland it will take a number of years to get the systems in place to deliver it effectively. Because it is a major policy shift, it does require an awful lot of debate, research and understanding that the dynamics in Ireland are very different to the dynamics in Portugal. But as a model, I think it’s a progressive way forward. I think it’s much more humane and I think it makes absolute sense if you have 70% of your drug convictions for possession for personal use. Those resources could be much better used tackling the pushers not the takers.”
It would remain a crime to profit from either the sale or distribution of illegal drugs, but drug takers would no longer be criminalized for their addictions.
In the United States, meanwhile, 1.5 million people were arrested for nonviolent drug charges in 2013 alone, according to the Drug Policy Alliance, despite evidence that mass incarceration has created more new crime than it has prevented. Few federal programs are available for those seeking drug treatment in the US, and in 2011 the federal government reinstated a ban on using federal money for syringe access programs.
President Barack Obama has been calling for an overhaul of the nation’s sentencing laws, recently telling (paywall) a gathering of top law enforcement officials that putting large numbers of nonviolent drug offenders in prison was neither fair nor an effective way of combating crime. This summer he granted clemency to 46 nonviolent drug offenders.