Professor Colin O'Gara

This really, I agree with Mary, it's a public health issue, but it also strikes at the heart of, is mental health and addiction on par with the rest of medicine?

And therefore, you know, is it going to be funded accordingly?

But really, the signals coming from a lot of the literature internationally in terms of the implementation of decriminalisation is one, you know, society needs to be ready for that, but particularly governments need to be ready for it and services on the ground need to be ready for it.

If you change...

the attendance and the engagement from one in 10 individuals with an addiction or a severe rare addiction to three or four attending, all of a sudden you have a strain on existing services.

And we know, Mary referred there to opioid services, we know that some opioid services across the country have long waiting lists, for instance, for counselling.

So if we're going to implement this harm reduction approach and this health led approach, how exactly are we going to fund it?

And this comes back every time to the same thing in a space where there's so many competing and very worthy interests in medicine.