David W. Higgins

speaker

220 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Aug

David W. Higgins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Brendan O'Connor · Newspaper Panel · 28 Jun 2026 podcast

Yeah, it's very hard to actually measure, get a good sample of just...

Exactly.

And so the decriminalisation argument would say, look, this is happening anyway, therefore you actually provide a better route for it.

But what's also worth pointing out in this piece is that Portugal, what really led them, I think, to get overdose deaths and things like that from other drugs down was that they were doing health diversion programmes so that when you are encountered by the police as having consumed a drug...

that you're actually also sent for a healthcare appointment as well.

We don't really do that currently.

I think in Ireland, there'll be a couple of thousand, you know, prosecutions each year for possession of drugs, but we're not really doing the same number of... 8,000 last year, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

And that is up in recent years as well.

So, like, maybe the case is to be said that you need to do that health intervention first, see how that goes.

Does that actually make those improvements?

And then the decriminalisation part could come along.

Liz, what do you think?

Yeah.

No.

Well, I mean, I think I mean, I think what the drugs we're talking about here are the harder ones, cocaine and well, not heroin for recreational use.

But like, you know, cocaine, you mentioned is a huge one.

I think it's worth just bringing in the story from Oregon, which is another state that actually decriminalized in 2020, but then reversed that policy in 2024.

Citizens had grown concerned an increase in open drug use, overdose deaths, violence, and that there were more paraphernalia such as syringes on the streets.

And that's something that needs to be considered when I think back to Bridget's point that you really need to separate some of the harder drugs here that come with that.

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