Matthew Sadler

We'll be very cautious about this, and I don't think we would welcome it perspectively.

I mean, saying that we should deal with drug use as a health-led approach is a bit like saying, you know, in regards to smoking, we just, instead of stopping people smoking, we'll just increase cancer treatments, you know, that we'll deal with as a health-led.

You know, what we know from surveys of Irish university students is that one of the reasons for, about 50% of the reason why people who've never used drugs don't use drugs is the risk of

of criminal prosecution.

And that we know that that is a prevention of people from using drugs.

And when you talk about drug policy, there's two groups of people who have two different sets of needs, and we fully accept that.

There's those who are already in addiction, but there are those who are not in addiction who have never used drugs.

And the easiest way to prevent somebody from falling into addiction is to prevent them from ever using drugs.

Decriminalisation, I do dispute the finding that they say that it doesn't increase use of drugs.

I would argue that in countries

If you look at Northwest North America, British Columbia had a derogation on decriminalization, which they ran for three years, and now they have stopped it because it was unsuccessful.

And they say they discriminalize using drugs for personal use.

And the experience from what I've read in the literature from British Columbia is that actually what has happened is they've just created different pathways for people into the criminal justice system.

whether through public order offences or specifically and significantly worrying through to driving offences.

So we would have a very big concern about this.

The health treatments for drug use are very poorly resourced in Ireland.

But actually, we have to be realistic that actually the treatment effects of it, the treatment of addiction isn't fantastic.

There's very few addiction treatments that have a higher than 20% abstinence rate or recovery rate.

Addiction treatment is about as successful as treatment for brain cancer and has a high mortality.

So the easiest way to prevent health effects from drugs is to stop people using drugs.