Professor Colin O'Gara

Yeah, good morning Ciara.

Essentially decriminalisation takes away the idea that if you suffer from an addiction primarily that you're going to be treated as a criminal.

So up to this point if you were caught in possession of drugs you would go down a criminal route.

The proposal here from the committee is that you would be put into a health system as opposed to a criminal system.

So that is a huge change and it's a huge change in terms of stigma

A lot of our patients, Ciara, who attend here to see me, for instance, in the outpatient setting, do not want to come into hospital because of the stigma.

We've got a massive issue in terms of access to services.

Some of the figures, for instance, are that only one in 10 people with the more rare forms of addiction will actually...

attend for treatment because of stigma.

So one of the key issues in terms of driving stigma is saying to a person when they're at their lowest ebb, in addition to being an addict, you're also a criminal.

And I think that has to stop.

Yeah, so for some people Ciara, they will use drugs in a hedonistic fashion, meaning they will go out

They will take drugs and they will go back to work on a Monday morning.

The estimates for, say, ecstasy, cocaine, stimulants, probably 1.5 million people.

You know, 20 years ago, we used to use the figure of a million people in the UK, one and a half million people in the UK using these drugs, some of whom will go to work on a Monday morning as if nothing happened.

My experience is that people take drugs for a whole host of reasons.

They take drugs because they're lonely.

They take drugs because they were bullied in school.

They take drugs because they were traumatised, be it physical, emotional or sexual abuse.

And they really on one level would not want to be taking drugs.