Apologies have been received from the Cathaoirleach, Deputy Gannon, for whom Deputy Rice is substituting. Apologies have also been received from Senators Ryan and Ní Chuilinn and from Senator Devine, for whom Deputy Ó Murchú is substituting.

I am pleased to open the 22nd public meeting of the joint committee and the sixth session in our legal issues module. I welcome our witnesses: Ms Nicole Luongo, policy and systems change analyst at the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition; Mr. Kellen Russoniello, director of public health at the Drugs Policy Alliance; Mr. Jack Farrell, PhD candidate in criminology at Simon Fraser University; Mx. D.J. Larkin, executive director at the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition; and Ms Isabel Pereira, senior co-ordinator for drugs policy at Dejusticia.

I will read a quick note on privilege before I begin, I remind witnesses and members of the long-standing parliamentary practice that they should not criticise or make charges against any person or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable or otherwise engage in speech that might be regarded as damaging to the good name of the person or entity. Therefore, if their statements are potentially defamatory in relation to an identifiable person or entity, they will be directed to discontinue their remarks. It is imperative that they comply with any such direction.

I remind members of the constitutional requirement that in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the Leinster House complex. Members of the committee attending remotely must do so from within the precincts of Leinster House. This is due to the constitutional requirement that, in order to participate in public meetings, members must be physically present within the confines of the place where Parliament has chosen to sit. In that regard, I ask any members participating via Microsoft Teams to confirm, prior to making their contributions, that they are on the grounds of the Leinster House campus.

As agreed, witnesses will each have five minutes to deliver their opening statements. This will allow sufficient time for questions and answers with members. If necessary, further or more detailed information can be submitted to the clerk to the committee for circulation to members.

I invite the witnesses to deliver their opening statements.

I thank the honourable committee for inviting me to speak today. I am the policy and systems change analyst for the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, CDPC. The CDPC is a national, non-partisan, civil society organisation in Canada pursuing drug policies that are grounded in scientific evidence, public health and safety and human rights. I have held my position for five years, during which time I have undertaken academic and legal research drafted, analysed and evaluated policies related to drug use and the social determinants of health and engaged with diverse government, civil society and public sector stakeholders. Prior to joining the CDPC, I completed a graduate degree in medical sociology. I also have extensive lived experience of criminalised drug use and Canada’s substance use treatment system. I look forward to addressing the committee.

I have carefully reviewed the report by the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use, and I will draw from lessons learned in the Canadian context to offer insight into how the recommendations therein can be successfully implemented and maximally effective. Given my limited time, I will focus on three substantive areas, namely, distinguishing the harmful effects of drug use from the harmful effects of drug laws and policies; the role of public attitudes and beliefs in drug policy reform; and designing robust substance use treatment services. I have submitted additional briefing material that significantly expands upon my opening statement.

First, on distinguishing the harmful effects of drug use from the harmful effects of drug laws and policies, my key points are that many of the harms that we attribute to drug use are in fact harms derived from drug laws and policies and that the primary driver of drug-related harms is drug prohibition. Therefore reducing drug-related harms at their source will require a radical overhaul of the international and domestic drug control regimes.

At the outset, I will emphasise one crucial fact that I hope will be internalised by the committee and seriously considered as it advances its mandate. Many of the harms that we attribute to drug use are in fact harms derived from drug laws and policies. Put differently, the CDPC adopts the position that although all drug use is associated with some risk of harm, drug use is made far more harmful by policies and laws that criminalise it. Indeed, the primary driver of drug-related harms is drug prohibition. This can be a challenging concept. It is one that I will happily elaborate, if requested. Ultimately, I urge the committee to reflect on how it will separate drug-related harms from drug policy-related harms as it develops, implements and evaluates drug policy reforms.

Second is the role of public attitudes and beliefs in drug policy reform. The success or failure of drug policy reform hinges on public support. Information about drug policies must be communicated to the public clearly, accurately and early. Special attention must be paid to engaging with marginalised communities, particularly those which historically have not been granted inclusive access to the public sphere.

The Canadian context has taught us that public support, or lack thereof, is a crucial determinant of a policy’s success or failure. The committee will hear more today about the province of British Columbia’s three-year decriminalisation policy. As I have detailed in my supplementary materials, decriminalisation in British Columbia was not a failure of policy so much as it was a failure of messaging. The public was repeatedly misled about what decriminalisation was, as well as its purposes, objectives and limitations. Additionally, in my work with language minority communities, I have learned that many marginalised groups have not been adequately engaged about governmental drug policy decisions. I urge the committee to consider how it will communicate information about future policy decisions clearly, accurately and early to generate and sustain public support for them.

Third is designing robust substance use treatment services. Substance use treatment alone will not eliminate drug-related harms. Treatment is not an appropriate intervention for many people who use substances. To be safe and effective, substance use treatment services must be accessible, high quality, culturally responsive and voluntary.

I wish to emphasise that drug use is not synonymous with having a substance use disorder and substance use treatment is not an appropriate intervention for many people. However, there will always be demand for these services. In December 2025, the CDPC published an organisational position paper on substance use treatment on which I was the lead author. The paper foregrounds four principles for ensuring that treatment services, which include withdrawal management services and inpatient and outpatient treatment, advance well-being, dignity, choice and equity. For treatment to be safe and effective, it must be accessible, high quality, culturally responsive and voluntary. I am eager to say more about how these principles can be enshrined into policy and practice, if requested.

I again thank this honourable committee for inviting me to speak today. I greatly appreciate committee members giving of their time and look forward to their questions.

Good evening, members of the joint committee. I am the director of public health for the Drug Policy Alliance, DPA.

DPA is the leading organisation in the United States working to address the harms of drug use and drug criminalisation through policy solutions, organising and public education. We advocate for an holistic approach to drugs that prioritises health, social supports and community well-being.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak about policies that reduce the harmful impacts of drug use. We need a comprehensive approach that addresses communities’ concerns and meets people’s needs regardless of their relationship to drugs. This includes evidence-based education and prevention, as well as readily available and effective harm reduction, treatment and recovery services. Treatment must be available on-demand, affordable, low-barrier and tailored to meet individual needs. This includes increasing services that address polysubstance use, co-occurring mental health conditions and other health and social needs.

In the United States, treatment for substance use disorder remains highly fragmented and riddled with barriers to access. Long wait times, high costs and limited flexibility, including many programmes that require abstinence, deter many from entering treatment and lead others to drop out. Many regions of the US still do not provide access to the highest standard of care for opioid use disorder treatment, methadone and buprenorphine, which reduce withdrawal and cravings and cut overdose risk by up to 50%. While recent changes have increased access to these life-saving medications, access remains far too restrictive, especially for methadone.

Harm reduction interventions complement treatment by providing a lifeline for people who are not ready to enter treatment and connections when they are. One harm reduction intervention that has demonstrated success in reducing overdose deaths, improving health and enhancing community safety is overdose prevention centres, OPCs. Staff in OPCs monitor participants for signs of overdose and intervene to prevent or reverse overdose thus saving lives. OPCs do not provide drugs but participants can bring pre-obtained substances.

OPCs have existed in many parts of the world for nearly 40 years but the first recognised OPCs in the US opened in New York City in 2021. That same year, the state of Rhode Island enacted legislation to establish OPCs with their first site opening in 2025. Participants have utilised the OPCs in New York over 244,000 times since opening in November 2021 and staff have intervened in over 2,000 overdoses, with no deaths. In the first year of operation of the Rhode Island OPC, participants utilised the service nearly 8,000 times and staff intervened in nearly 200 emergencies with no deaths. The OPCs in both New York and Rhode Island connect participants to a variety of health and social services, including substance use disorder treatment when people are ready.

Other harm reduction interventions include syringe service programs, which provide sterile equipment that reduces the spread of infectious diseases and naloxone for reversing opioid overdoses. Drug checking has also expanded in many states. People can test what is in their drugs thus allowing them to make more informed decisions about their use that reduce risk. Many states have amended their paraphernalia laws to exempt drug-checking equipment and services. Some states have taken steps to reduce the criminalisation of people who use drugs, which serves as a barrier to seeking help. The state of Minnesota recently repealed criminal penalties for possession of paraphernalia, thereby joining several other states that do not criminalise it.

Criminalising drug use and drug use equipment deters people from accessing health services and leads to behaviours that increase risk of overdose and infectious disease. Even with a comprehensive array of services, the criminalisation of drug use and possession will continue to be a barrier to accessing services and will exacerbate health inequities. Further, the drug supply remains ever-changing and unpredictable. We need to engage in conversations about decriminalisation, safer supply and sensible regulation.

I have focused on policies that have shown success in reducing drug-related harms. Of course, the United States also has a long history of implementing drug policies that not only do not work but that amplify the harms of drug use and create new harms.

Unfortunately, the federal Government is taking a regressive approach to drug policy focused on militarised supply-side interventions, harsh criminal penalties and forced treatment, all while cutting funding for basic health services and interventions that keep people safe and healthy. This threatens the progress that has been made in recent years to reduce overdose deaths, which remain above 70,000 annually. This harmful approach should be avoided elsewhere.

I thank committee members for their time and look forward to their questions.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak. I am a PhD candidate at Simon Fraser University. My research focuses on how meanings of drug policy are constructed and disseminated. My knowledge of drug policy is academic, but also comes from my experience of working on the front line in housing shelters in Dublin and Vancouver. The observations I will make today are grounded in my doctoral research, a systematic framing analysis of 187 news articles on decriminalisation in British Columbia.

Having reviewed previous sessions, I understand the committee has already heard extensive evidence on whether decriminalisation is effective and on what model Ireland might adopt. Those are critically important questions. However, a policy’s success is not only shaped by its design or effects, but how it comes to be perceived, interpreted and debated. My statement today focuses on the lessons that can be taken from British Columbia's experience of decriminalisation, specifically with regards to media narratives, political debate and public opinion.

In British Columbia, decriminalisation was effective in reducing drug-related arrests, yet it quickly became associated with rising disorder and public drug use. Despite the absence of clear empirical evidence linking the policy to these outcomes, a narrative of disorder came to dominate how the policy was understood and ultimately contributed to the decision to end it. While some have taken British Columbia as evidence that decriminalisation does not work, I urge the committee to avoid this conclusion. Instead, the key lesson is that when it comes to perceptions of policy success, narratives about decriminalisation matter as much as the effects of the policy. If anything, the decision to end decriminalisation is a testament to the power of storytelling in drug policy.

I would like to offer three recommendations to the committee. My first recommendation is that if Ireland introduces decriminalisation, it should expect and prepare for a backlash centred on disorder and public drug use. Responding effectively to the backlash will require two things. First, it is essential that the effects of decriminalisation are distinguished from broader structural issues, such as poverty and housing, which are the primary drivers of public drug use. Second, public concerns about disorder must be taken seriously. Even when perceptions of disorder are not supported by evidence, they reflect real experiences of insecurity. Dismissing these concerns as irrational or as a moral panic is not only ineffective but risks alienating the very public whose support is needed.

My second recommendation is that the parameters of success must be defined clearly at the outset of decriminalisation. One of the challenges in British Columbia was that decriminalisation was judged against immediate, visible conditions. At the same time, its intended benefits, such as reducing stigma or improving access to care, were long-term and difficult to measure. If success is not clearly defined at the outset of decriminalisation, the policy will become vulnerable to being judged as a failure, regardless of its actual impact.

My third recommendation is that media debate must be complemented by sustained public engagement and education. Policymakers cannot expect their desired meaning of decriminalisation to be passively transmitted to the public. Direct engagement with communities must begin before implementation and continue long after, recognising that attitudes shaped by decades of prohibition will not change overnight. Crucially, this engagement must include the leadership of people who use drugs. As highlighted by UISCE in a previous session of this committee, involving people who use drugs is not only a matter of human rights, but of policy effectiveness.

I stress that the success of decriminalisation depends not only on well-designed policy but on a clear and compelling vision of what it represents and signifies. Drug policy reform is ultimately an argument about the kind of society we want to build. If decriminalisation is to succeed in Ireland, it must clearly articulate a vision of why it matters and how it will contribute to a society where people are not criminalised for their suffering.

I thank the honourable committee for inviting me to speak with it and inviting me to be in attendance on the campus for this hearing by way of video. I am the executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, the same organisation as my colleague, Ms Luongo. I am also an adjunct professor at the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University and a lawyer with 15 years' experience in constitutional and human rights law in Canada.

Having reviewed the citizens' assembly report, it contains a wealth of information and thoughtful recommendations. In this introduction, I will focus on four themes emergent from that report, based on experience, research and data from the Canadian context. The four themes will be: structural stigma, education, implementation and international treaties. I will begin with structural stigma, which is a theme throughout the report.

Stigma is often conceptualised as a personal belief that operates on an individual or social group level. Stigma, however, also manifests through law and policy. Stigma reduction campaigns should consider how legislation and approaches to decriminalisation, diversion and de-penalisation may unintentionally reinforce stigma. The following are key points to note in that regard. Maintaining an overarching criminal label on activities such as drug possession can create cognitive dissonance in public discourse that limits the success of stigma-reduction education. A heavy reliance on diversion to substance-use treatment as the primary alternative to criminal sanction can create an either-or understanding of substance use and drug policy that encourages support for involuntary health-based detention and alternative forms of criminalisation. The structural and internalised stigma inherent in an activity being labelled "criminal" has a chilling effect on a person's willingness to speak openly about substance use, and to seek care and emergency support. I urge the committee to consider legislative amendments to how drug possession and street-level sharing or poverty-based selling of drugs are categorised and what criminal legal sanctions attach to those activities. I also urge it to consider implementing clear "good Samaritan" protections in legislation and institutional policies that provide amnesty against arrest, prosecution, conviction and other sanctions, such as eviction or academic sanction, for people who seek emergency services at the scene of a drug overdose.

My brief comments on education will focus on education directed towards young people. Key points to note are as follows. Prevention education does not and will not prevent all drug use or address all reasons why young people may use drugs and can unintentionally motivate drug use as a form of subversion or expression of autonomy. Young people are often more comfortable seeking support and assistance from peers so it is of the utmost importance that young people also receive not only prevention education and age-appropriate harm reduction and overdose response education.

I will move to implementation. Clear, achievable goals and outcomes-based evaluation is essential, especially in a complicated context such as this. Key points to note are as follows. Eradicating or significantly curtailing the drug supply, stopping gang activity or forcing criminal organisations to divest from the drug trade are not plausible outcomes.

Goals focused on reducing harm and improving health, social and economic equity, while acknowledging that drug use will continue to occur, provides a more targeted and practical focus. For example, using an outcomes-based evaluation, if you were to look at the rates of drug seizures, arrests or diversions, those are not actually indicators of success per se. Rather, assessing those should consider whether such activities are generating beneficial or negative social, health and equity outcomes. Establishing both immediate and mid-term goals can support early success and can reinforce public support, such as prioritising immediate low-barrier naloxone availability and mandatory training, and establishing compassion clubs for people most at risk of harm as an urgent mid-term goal.

Finally, I will speak briefly to international treaties. There is no international consensus that UN drug control treaties are producing health and human rights compliant outcomes. I urge this committee to prioritise implementation based in international human rights standards and, specifically, looking to the international guidelines on human rights and drug policy in its work. Within the UN drug control treaty system, states are not obligated to categorically enforce these treaties through prohibitions and interdiction. States retain the power to take alternative action domestically and several have done so, including Canada's cannabis reforms and numerous decriminalisation policies around the world. I welcome questions on the submissions or any other aspects of the report that are within my knowledge. I have submitted a supplementary brief that expands on my comments. I thank the committee for its time.

I thank the committee for this invitation. It was great to hear my colleagues present on their extensive work and meet some of them again. I will be sharing the experience of Colombia's decriminalisation model, which is 30-plus years in the making. I am a drug policy co-ordinator at a human rights NGO based in Colombia.

Where is this decriminalisation model rooted, at least for us in our work in Dejusticia? We anchor the decriminalisation model in a human rights framework. The argument is not merely pragmatic in a sense that decriminalisation frees up resources; it is more than that. It holds that criminalising personal consumption is an intrinsically disproportionate state response that violates personal dignity, privacy and autonomy. The constitutional court in Colombia many times over has reiterated the core values of this decriminalisation model. The state cannot criminalise self-regarding conduct that causes no direct harms to others. For example, simple possession is a sole conduct that is inherent to the individual himself.

This framework is also in line with the international guidelines on human rights and drug policy that have been mentioned before. In terms of the legal process that happened in Colombia to achieve our decriminalisation model, back in 1986, our national narcotics statute introduced criminal sanctions for any activity related to personal possession or use of drugs. They were severe sanctions. However, through a constitutional court ruling issued in 1994 - it was way back in the day and we were quite the pioneers - the court decided that all criminal penalties for personal possession were unconstitutional. It is rooted in three core rights that are enshrined in our 1991 constitution: the right to personal autonomy, the right to privacy and the constitutional guarantee of the freedom to develop one's own personality.

Once this decision was adopted, the court reiterated in many rulings that possession cannot be sanctioned, but the issue around personal use has had some other setbacks. The key legal tension here is that because our decriminalisation model has been established through court rulings and not through comprehensive legislation, it has presented a persistent gap between constitutional rights on paper and their enforcement in practice. That is a gap that should be anticipated in any decision the committee takes and should be closed proactively so the legislative design proactively protects people and prevents these gaps from becoming possible.

The most prominent gap we have faced is the introduction of the police code in 2016. Even though decriminalisation as I have outlined continues to be the norm, the police code introduced administrative sanctions for personal use and use in public spaces. These administrative sanctions can effectively recriminalise people who use drugs even under a decriminalisation model, which is the situation we are in right now. The police code introduced administrative fines and seizure for possession and use of drugs in public spaces, along with many other circumstances. In 2019, the constitutional court struck these down as unconstitutional, but once again, as there was no legislative process to prevent this from happening again, Congress again introduced some of these sanctions.

In 2023, the court reviewed and revised these rules again with two critical rulings. On possession, it reaffirmed unambiguously that this is private, constitutionally protected conduct that cannot be sanctioned under any circumstances, which was a great decision. However, on the issue of public use, it found the blanket restrictions are neither necessary or proportional but it maintained them and gave power to municipal authorities to define the specific manner, time and place of restriction. This is where the problem has arisen.

From then onwards, there has been a patchwork of violations of constitutional standards. A total of 48 municipal decrees have been issued since 2023 and 17 of them are blatantly unconstitutional. Eighteen sanction simple possession even though the court ruling is clear that possession itself cannot be restricted or sanctioned. At least ten decrees impose restrictions that are blanket prohibitions in practice because they are 24 hours a day, seven days a week and effect a total ban the court had explicitly ruled as disproportionate. They operate in all public spaces, eliminating freedom of movement, and have targeted people who are usually the people most severely targeted by prohibition and criminalising practices. To date, 71% of the sanctions since then have been imposed on people between 16 and 30 years of age, concentrating on young people who are the people who have no private space to use drugs. Most of the sanctions have been imposed on quantities that do not even meet the threshold of the 20 g of marijuana that is allowed as a personal dose legally in Colombia.

The key lesson here is that decriminalisation legislation that leaves discretionary administrative sanctioning powers intact, whether with police or local authorities, risks reproducing criminalisation through the back door. The Colombian data shows these powers will be used broadly and against the most vulnerable, regardless of constitutional protections on paper. I can of course share more information on these issues if the committee is interested. I thank members for their time and attention.

I thank Ms Pereira. We will now move to questions. In the first round of questions, members will have seven minutes each. Time permitting, we will move to a second round.

I have three questions which I might ask first. The witnesses can then share out the remaining minutes to speak to them. The first one is about Ms Luongo's contribution on the drug policy harm versus the harms of drug use. That is a conversation we are having more and more. People physically look at a substance and the harm it may have on an individual person's life. That conversation is definitely shifting to understanding what is the gravity of the harm of drugs policy and how that changes the shift in thinking to look at policy versus the instances of harm to a person from drugs. Will Ms Luongo speak a little bit more on what are the harms of drug policy, specifically?

The second question is to Mr. Farrell. It frightens me a little bit when we think of how to measure success.

We have had the drugs Act in Ireland since the late seventies. The intention behind introducing that Act related to the UN treaty and so on. States and governments have not had to prove that prohibition has succeeded but, when we look at decriminalisation, there is a pressure to show success in a short space of time despite prohibition having caused harm for generations. What kind of realistic narrative do the witnesses suggest to explain that decriminalisation will not necessarily reduce drug use? Some people think that is what it is intended to do but it is actually about reducing harm. Will the witnesses speak a little more to that point?

I will direct the next point to Ms Pereira. The area of constitutional law is quite interesting. We have not gone into that very much in Ireland. I am not a constitutional expert but I do not think we have any explicit right to privacy or bodily autonomy. However, I believe the courts have inferred from Article 40.3.2° of our Constitution that we have rights in respect of bodily integrity, privacy and dignity. Perhaps Ms Pereira would speak to that a little bit more. I am not talking so much about relying on constitutional arguments but about the importance of legislation. It is a big conversation here because we look to the UK, which has started to introduce de facto decriminalisation in certain jurisdictions, but it is police-led. That is being done because of a lack of will to change the UK's drugs legislation. Will Ms Pereira talk about universal application of the law and the importance of legislation to prevent discretion or de facto practices in particular regions deciding where decriminalisation does and does not apply? A lack of legislation can lead to such situations. Those are the three areas I wanted to discuss.

Does Senator Ruane want to call on a particular speaker?

I suggest we call on the witnesses in the order I asked the questions, that is, Ms Luongo, Mr. Farrell and then Ms Pereira.

I thank the Senator for the question. I will try to keep my answer relatively high-level. In terms of separating the harms of drug use from drug policy and law, in the Canadian context, in the last decade, more than 55,000 people have died from apparent opioid toxicity. Thousands more have died from stimulant or mixed substance toxicity. Every day in Canada, about 26 people die. These deaths are not due to the mere fact of drug use. Rates of drug use and substance use disorder diagnosis in Canada have remained relatively stable. These deaths can actually be linked to the unregulated nature of the illegal drug supply.

Drug-related mortality in Canada has risen at a staggering rate because the substances in Canada's unregulated drug supply have become increasingly unpredictable, contaminated and potent. The volatility of the drug supply is a direct consequence of our drug laws and enforcement practices. Our federal Government, in collaboration with provincial and territorial governments, has attempted to eradicate the illegal drug supply by prohibiting activities related to certain drugs. That includes large drug seizures, border enforcement and street-level policing. However, none of these initiatives actually reduce market demand for drugs. What they do is prevent the Government for implementing quality control, oversight and manufacturer accountability mechanisms throughout the drug supply chain. By ceding control of the drug supply chain to organised criminal groups, we are amplifying the risk of drug use because manufacturers are incentivised to maximise profits and to evade law enforcement and border detection. They do this by adding more concentrated substances to the supply. Large-scale production has not been thwarted by enforcement. Production has just become more sophisticated and more clandestine. We know that large drug seizures are also correlated with increased rates of fatal overdoses.

This all speaks to the nature of drug supply under a prohibitionist legal architecture but it says nothing about the health and social consequences of criminalisation, which are myriad. As I have stated, not everyone who consumes criminalised drugs has a substance use disorder warranting medical treatment but those who do are incentivised to conceal their use and not to pursue supports because there are so many possible consequences to disclosing drug use. We also know that policing pushes people to use in isolation, which again increases the risk of overdose. When we follow people, whether those who have been diagnosed with a substance use disorder or those who have been criminalised, through their institutional trajectories, whether in the education system, the employment system or the child welfare system, we see that just the label of being a criminalised drug user implements that structural stigma we talked about, which really informs people's entire life journeys. When I say we need to separate the harms of drug use from the harms of drug law and policy, that is what I am talking about. We need to recognise that, while drug use is associated with some risk, it is made far riskier and more dangerous than it needs to be by that legal architecture that implements criminal and, at times, medical penalties.

I thank Ms Luongo. Senator Ruane also had questions for-----

I had questions for Mr. Farrell and Ms Pereira. I know I have gone slightly over time but I will not be coming back in so perhaps the Leas-Chathaoirleach could give me a bit of leeway, if the committee is okay with that.

Do the members agree to extending the time for responses? That is agreed.

I thank Senator Ruane for the question. This is connected to what Ms Luongo was just mentioning. It is the unfortunate reality that people are a lot quicker to attribute harms to drug policy reform than to prohibition. One way to think about it is that the debate on decriminalisation will not be won the day it is implemented. Decriminalisation is something that enables an ongoing discussion. Part of that involves distinguishing the pre-existing harms caused by a century of prohibition. That is not going to be an easy debate. It will not be easy to convince the public of it. However, the point of decriminalisation is not just to get the policy over the line but to begin and facilitate a change in how the public thinks. Part of it is that it is really important to be realistic. We must not overpromise. Ultimately, decriminalisation makes people safer. It makes people use drugs more safely but, ultimately, it also makes the public safer. The public might not feel that on day one or year one of the policy but, in the long term, it is a reasonable expectation based on what we know.

I thank the Senator for the question. I will just briefly go over some clarifications and ideas that engage with this conversation. The first is that this means of achieving reform through the constitution and what we refer to as "judicial activism" is very particular to the Latin American region. Most progressive reforms in Colombia and other countries in the region have come through this type of legal activism and bringing cases to courts. There are many reasons for this. Abortion rights, marriage equality and drug decriminalisation have all come through constitutional courts or supreme courts in many countries in the region. That is a matter of the context in which we operate. The protection of these types of rights through the courts is one of many routes that can achieve decriminalisation.

I will highlight some pros and cons of delivering decriminalisation through this particular journey. It seems to me that, once the decriminalisation model was introduced and criminal sanctions were lifted, we were very comfortable with the fact that not much more was done to bring comprehensive social and health services to this community or to bring about a conversation as to what decriminalisation can bring to societies.

In what I am hearing from colleagues that have studied other jurisdictions, this public conversation is much richer, even if there is backlash against the decriminalisation through a collective conversation. In the case of Colombia where it came through a one-sided decision from the constitutional court to protect rights, it is just one norm that no one really wants to talk about in the sense that it does not bring questions about which services should be put in place for people to be better even if the legal sanctions are eliminated. There are still more things that could be done to improve quality of life for people who use drugs. We have not actually had that conversation. The journey through decriminalisation via this route sometimes leaves out that broad conversation. It is very much focused on the individual protection of a right, which is, of course, crucial. The good thing about that is that the court strikes back and says that these are the fundamental rights in our constitution. They cannot be taken away but it does not bring a collective conversation. This is something to bear in mind.

The following is a good side to it, with nuance. Whether or not we win the public debate on decriminalisation, it is also tricky because, as I said before, there is not much more of a debate. It is just a court decision. That is where it ends, which is both good and bad. It kind of lowers the profile of the public conversation on a topic that often is so fraught with tensions that it perhaps has an upside to it to say that it is just a court decision. No one can debate whether these fundamental rights are protected, but we do not have the collective conversation of what should be in place beyond lifting the sanctions, which is a pending conversation in our country.

I thank the witnesses for their presentations and for the work that they are doing in this area in providing very useful information to us.

I will ask Mr. Farrell about the decriminalisation. I suppose there are two issues I want to raise. First, what was the decriminalisation? Was it decriminalisation in relation to someone not being prosecuted in possession for their own supply or was there decriminalisation that would allow a person to be able to supply?

On the second issue, I was involved in opening a supervised injection facility here in Dublin. It is working effectively. People are going into the centre and are able to inject themselves. It is supervised, so there is back-up support. If there is an adverse outcome of the injection, there are staff to deal with it. Rather than people having to be admitted to hospital, there are experienced staff with the expertise to deal with it there. I suppose people going in there with the drug are technically in breach of the law but we are managing it in a better way so that there is a better outcome for them because it is now supervised rather than being on the side of the street. We did not have a backlash to that, although there was some criticism of it. Why was there such a backlash and what provoked it?

I thank the Deputy so much for those questions. On the first question as to what was decriminalisation in British Columbia, BC, it was the decriminalisation of simple possession. Therefore, trafficking and supply-side charges could still be laid and there could still be arrests. It was purely for simple possession.

The second question is a great question. In a way, it is the central question of my PhD: why did the backlash happen? The most interesting thing to me is that it had very little to do with decriminalisation, as strange as that sounds. There was a large amount of animosity, fear and precarity among people in BC, partly even stemming from the fallout of Covid, housing issues and policies that existed long before decriminalisation. Interestingly, within three days of decriminalisation in BC, there were politicians in the media saying that the debates were over, the results were in and decriminalisation had been an absolute and abject failure. Three days into the policy, it was not even plausible that effects could have occurred. There was a preset narrative of it failing and it being a failure already there.

I am heartened to hear that there was not much of a backlash in Dublin. Obviously, the cultural contexts are very different. It could manifest in different ways or not manifest at all. A lot of the backlash came from misattributing what caused social problems. As Ms Luongo pointed out earlier, there are the symptoms of disorder, let us say, in BC. There is visible homelessness. These are things that people see and then it makes them scared and feel in danger or threatened. When they were given an explanation for this, decriminalisation became a scapegoat, but the backlash came from real feelings of insecurity and precarity about things such as the cost of living and housing and a more general sense of things becoming out of control. To summarise, the backlash had little to do with the policy of decriminalisation and a lot more to do with much broader feelings of fear, anxiety and precarity experienced by the public.

If the contributors from Canada, especially Mx. Larkin, were in charge in the morning, what changes would they make in order to get the buy-in and also get the benefits of the policy that currently exists? What changes need to be made at this stage? Obviously, what we are watching in Ireland is not the same. As I said about the supervised injection facility being opened, it was a long, drawn-out event but everyone was involved, from the Garda to the Departments and the educational sector. Right across the board, there was a whole lot of people involved in the development of the facility. What mistakes were made so that there now needs to be buy-in in Canada in order to improve what is currently there?

I thank the Deputy for that question. I certainly would echo much of what my co-presenters and colleagues have said.

In terms of what needs to change, if we focus first on decriminalisation, there are the implementation aspect and some structural aspects to it. In terms of implementation, there was a great deal of thought into core planning within a select group of people. That was a good group. Unfortunately, it was not coupled with really proactive dialogue. I say "dialogue" rather than education intentionally because dialogue is what is essential where you get to hear people's concerns, have a discussion about shared goals, and give space for people to express their concerns in a way that they feel safe in doing so and can receive evidence-based information and have an opportunity to change their perspectives. That did not happen. Essentially, decriminalisation was announced, there were some press releases, there was optional training for police officers that was quite problematic in its design and not taken up in the way that it needed to be, and there was not a dedicated engagement with communities, law enforcement and municipalities.

Looking at it now, what needs to be done in order to get that buy-in? That is what I am wondering.

We could look to a community dialogue model. I would point to a colleague, Ms Luongo, on this. Going back to municipalities' places where concerns have been raised, it is essential to tell people we want to talk, to hear what their concerns are and to walk them through a process of discussing both the issues and what goals they would like to see. If we do that, what we have seen in our dialogue-based work is that people can shift their perspectives very quickly. However, it has to be a conversation.

The second thing is really needing to address the limitations of decriminalisation in the context of our housing crisis and the nature of the drugs supply. Decriminalisation is more effective if our services are responsive.

In the Canadian context, most people inhale their drugs now but most supervised consumption services do not have inhalation, so those folks cannot go inside. We need to address that. Second, we need to address the drugs supply. People are upset at seeing people in public spaces partly because they are sedated for longer because of benzodiazepines and tranquillisers in the supply. Third, we need to address the implementation and design of decriminalisation to really reflect the amount that people carry, remote communities and marginalised communities, and implement decriminalisation in a way that is honestly cognisant of those poverty issues.

Is it not difficult to change people's views, especially families where they have lost a loved one? Is that not a big challenge in itself?

That issue is so core because almost everyone is coming to this conversation from a level of grief and loss and how we respond in those moments is really important. The approach is to be with people who have faced struggle or loss and be able to walk through a conversation about how criminal sanction and criminalisation are not going to have the result that we want. Neither is involuntary healthcare detention. It can actually increase those risks and break down those family units, so it is much harder to build those systems of care. Trying to prohibit all drug use simply is not going to happen so let us implement policy that is practical and make sure that our loved ones today know what is in the drugs, have somewhere safe to go and are not ever scared to call an ambulance. If we can agree on those things, we can get to those policy changes.

I thank Mx. Larkin very much.

I thank all of the witnesses for their presentations today. This is my first time speaking in this committee so I would like to set out my own position. Our drugs policy and legislation have fundamentally failed individuals, families and communities with devastating consequences. We urgently need reform of the law and policy to reduce harm in particular. We see it in practice in my constituency in Cork, where public drug users are policed and moved from one part of the city to another, causing issues in communities. There is a lack of addiction support services. Unlike Dublin, we do not have a safe injection facility or what was described here as an overdose prevention centre, OPC. We lack the services and supports that are crucially needed for people.

I have two questions in relation to that about what needs to change. I have one in particular on the safe injection or overdose prevention centres. The response I received from the Minister when I raised this issue with her about opening one in Cork like they have in Dublin is that we have to wait until a pilot is completed, and it will take an extended period of time to review the evidence. I am interested in hearing from Kellen in particular, as he mentioned in his opening statement that they have existed for 40 years around the world, so there must be an extent or a bank of international evidence there that we could rely on for why this should be done. Perhaps he could talk to us a bit more about some of the evidence that is there on their effectiveness so that we in Ireland do not need to rely on reviewing our own pilot and delaying further, because there was a very significant delay of a number of years between the initial Cabinet approval and the opening of the safe injection facility. We cannot have that again in the context of expanding to other parts of the city or to other cities. I am really keen to see progress there so I am interested in hearing about that evidence.

The second question is for D.J. They mentioned one of the medium-term goals as establishing compassion clubs for people most at risk of harm. They might talk a bit more about that as it is a new concept to me.

I am happy to jump in first to talk about OPCs. As I mentioned, they have been in place. The first one opened nearly 40 years ago in Switzerland and now there are almost 200 operating around the world. I would invite my colleagues from Canada to speak on this more because they have a longer history with supervised consumption sites in Canada than we do in the United States. The nearly 40 years of evidence does show consistently that overdose prevention centres save lives by preventing overdose deaths. They reduce the spread of infectious disease by providing safe sterile-use equipment and providing access to primary healthcare services for people who are injecting or smoking. They provide a pathway to substance use disorder treatment for people who want that, and other health and social services, including housing and employment services. They also provide a lot of benefits for community safety. A lot of the concern in the United States - I imagine it is the same in Canada - is around public drug use. One of the solutions to that is to provide a place for people to not use in public because when you provide a place that is welcoming and provides connections to services, people come to use them. We found that over and over in the research as well.

I would be happy to follow up with the committee to provide an annotated bibliography of the studies that have been done on OPCs over the years. A really great resource was put forward by Brown University that is a collection of all the research that has been done over 40 years, which has demonstrated that they have consistent benefits. Each time they are implemented somewhere new, we see those benefits repeated. The Deputy alluded to the situation in Ireland. We have the same problem in the United States where a jurisdiction says "Well, we haven't tried it here, so we don't know if it works", but every time we have seen these implemented in new places across the world, we have seen those benefits repeated. I share the frustration about the pilot programme, but I think we can agree at this point that the evidence shows that they are totally effective and they save lives.

I thank Mr. Russoniello very much.

The notion of a compassion club is something that has operated in a number of arenas and issues. Within the context of substance use, this is a model that exists within a spectrum of interventions that really look at how we stop some of the most immediate and egregious harms that are produced, as my colleague noted, by the drug policy context and the drug supply. In Canada, there have been very limited programmes to offer prescription-based access to certain substances like hydromorphone, diacetylmorphine and sometimes stimulants through a prescription-based model. The goal there is to immediately remove a person from the unregulated drug supply, to greatly decrease their risk of overdose, death or injury, and to help someone to exit from a criminalised market environment and criminal activity. Those programmes were very limited in Canada and they have structural limitations in terms of accessibility and how effective they are.

In my additional briefing notes I have linked to a couple of resources about compassion club models and non-medicalised models for implementing immediate action. Looking at compassion clubs specifically, they are aimed at someone who uses drugs regularly - daily - who is at significant risk of overdose, harm and death and is seeking that immediate safety first of all. Second, they are seeking to access those other wraparound services and to build a sense of community with people who have a shared experience and to increase that sense of social inclusion, to improve the ability of folks to be a part of a community and be seen as part of a community. Compassion-club models can be very powerful.

This can be done through regulated mechanisms where people work with the Government to get access to drugs that are of known ingredients and potency and they are provided on a not-for-profit basis to very specific members of a compassion club who are vetted in terms of their substance use and how it is going to be properly controlled. We see that there is basically immediate benefit to this type of programme. In Canada, we have tested that through the NAOMI and SALOME trials with both diacetylmorphine or heroin and hydromorphone. Unfortunately, the compassion clubs that had operated historically in Canada were not granted legal authority by the federal government so they could not access those substances through a legal mechanism. However, because so many people were dying every day - it was so incredibly urgent to act - they took action and sourced substances through the dark web.

They tested those drugs using the best technology available, packaged them, labelled them with health warnings, worked with very experienced researchers from a number of universities to build the club and develop a membership and provided them on a not-for-profit basis. Immediately, we saw results. People were not overdosing and dying. People were not overdosing and requiring naloxone. Those social determinants were starting to show improvement. Unfortunately, that club was shut down because the Government did not participate to support it by means of a legal pathway. There are legal ways to do it. It can be very effective and quite immediate. It solves a lot of problems in terms of criminal law involvement and health risk.

I thank the witnesses for their input. In a number of committee engagements over the past while, it has been about trying to deal with all the issues that, unfortunately, come from drug use and misuse. This relates to everything from criminality and violence to the absolute chaos in people's lives to the health impact and, in absolutely brutal circumstances, to the deaths that can be caused.

In the context of what has been done to date across most of the western world, what people describe as the war on drugs has been an absolute and abject failure. We are trying to get to grips with something that works better in putting health supports around the addict and in dealing with the societal ills that can be caused. A number of the witnesses spoke about issues around decriminalisation. We have dealt with that at previous meetings. Dr. Cian Ó Concubhair dealt with it specifically last week. People spoke about the Portuguese model, and one of the issues was greater visible drug use. From our point of view, there are probably simple enough fixes for that and for ensuring that there is still an illegality involved and that it is absolutely allowable. We also have to look into the means of how we allow people who are going to take drugs to take them in more appropriate settings, for want of a better term, where they are safer. It is also about providing those supports that can facilitate people in harm reduction and even getting themselves beyond that. It is about the learnings from the examples our witnesses have given.

When we are talking about drug use, much as it is prevalent across all socio-economic groups, the real issue is generally in poorer, more deprived communities where we are dealing with multigenerational trauma, housing issues and lack of resources. When we do not have those supports, we create the conditions for this to happen. I can never move away too much from also making the point that we have to deal with serious criminals. We cannot be seen to let that go. In an awful lot of cases, they have a detrimental impact, particularly in deprived communities. They are the bad example sometimes that is left to kids who do not necessarily have the supports we should provide for them. They just see it as a means of getting out of there or making money. The question I am asking, starting with Mr. Farrell and Mx. Larkin, from what they have seen to date, if they were starting again, what do they see as the best means of offering decriminalisation since it will need multiple other supports? I was really bought into the idea of having a conversation and meeting people halfway on the worries they have, rather than education and talking down to them.

I agree completely that decriminalisation would need a host of wraparound policies and supports for it to be really effective. Echoing what another member said, one of those examples would be to implement supervised consumption sites, more in Dublin and more in rural areas. Something that was very important in British Columbia was that rural areas had a real lack of harm reduction, even though Vancouver has a lot more, let us say. Connected to this is what the Deputy was mentioning about public drug use. Ultimately, that is not caused by drug policy one way or another. People use drugs in public because they do not have a house to use them in. Personally, living in Vancouver since 2019, I have not noticed any change in the number of people who use drugs in public before decriminalisation, during it and we are not four or five months out from it not existing. The level of public drug use has not gone down. The degree to which the police enforce laws on people using drugs in public does not do anything in respect of the numbers who use drugs in public. That is a really important point. Housing is the issue when it comes to public drug use.

If the idea or goal of decriminalisation is increasing people's access to support, that only works if there are supports. You need to also have investment in health infrastructure and housing infrastructure, and more targeted interventions like supervised consumption sites, compassion clubs, as Mr. Larkin mentioned. I would definitely recommend that. There is a whole host of interventions. Decriminalisation should not be seen as just doing that and everything will figure itself out. That definitely will not be the case.

Around this question of visible drug use, like my friend here, I would challenge whether or not that is actually true. There are a few things happening. First, we do have a housing crisis. Second, enforcement was quite inconsistent prior to decriminalisation. To the question that was raised earlier, when there is not a legislative change you see really inconsistent policing practices. There is a study from BC indicating that was the case. One of the questions that needs to be asked is what the drug possession laws are being used for. A lot of the backlash we saw in BC was around law enforcement saying it did not have a mechanism to move a person along in order that their poverty would no longer be visible and would not make others uncomfortable. They were not using drug possession laws for a health purpose or for the core purpose of criminal sanction, but rather using it as a way to render people invisible. There was an argument, essentially, that it was harder to make structural suffering that people are experiencing less visible and thus less uncomfortable to people who are housed and have access to care.

The second question that we would raise in the BC context is the changes in the supply. I am also in Vancouver and travel to Victoria and other places in the province. I cannot say that I saw an increase in public drug use. I did see an increase in the length of time people were sedated, so it was more likely that someone would be noticed. Our drug supply contains chemicals that can cause hours of sedation, which makes people see it more. Third, we have a confirmation bias problem. As soon as you start talking about something and you start attributing it to one particular policy, people start to reinforce that notion. Those are the first questions I would ask.

To the point on wraparound services, housing, healthcare, all of that, I agree. Policy reform towards decriminalisation should not be stalled because it will take time to deal with healthcare systems and housing. We need to be able to talk about the actual discrete benefit of decriminalisation. The question I sometimes ask relates to whether someone is at risk right now. Do we think that putting them in jail and having someone experience withdrawal and then be rereleased to the streets, have even less access to housing, have a criminal record and be more excluded from their communities is going to make that better? If the answer is no, then even while we are working on these broader systems of support, we should be supporting decriminalisation and depenalisation.

On the housing piece, I will just say yes, absolutely.

We all have a lot of work to do on housing, but when the drug supply is unregulated, just be mindful that using alone in housing is quite an extraordinary risk.

To the question of who is impacted, it is often folks who are at multiple intersections and marginalisation. I am interested to know in the Irish context because in the Canadian context it is blue-collar workers, people who work in construction, trades and transport, who are being very disproportionately impacted and dying. These are people who are in the workforce but are not finding places where they feel comfortable talking about substance use or reaching for help.

When it comes to serious criminals, the question is whether you are looking at the harm, violence, corruption and extortion and at those multi-markets and multi-mechanisms that organised crime groups work within? Is there is an over-focus on drug law enforcement with the ostensible goal of eradicating the supply? That over-focus on drug law enforcement does not tend to be effective.

I thank Deputy Ó Murchú and now it is my turn. I thank all of the witnesses for their participation in our meeting and for the work they are doing. It has been interesting to listen to their contributions and hear about their experiences. It is not a little depressing to hear Ms Pereira say that is 30 years on and the challenges sound as daunting as what we face, albeit in a different environment. Thirty years is a very sobering number. It sounds like 30 years of iterations and lives that have been lost, damaged and affected.

We have an enormous challenge as a committee to take the citizens' assembly recommendations and make concrete recommendations to Government for changes to policy and legislation. I think what I am hearing from the witnesses is a consensus or an urging to us, and I would like them to confirm or reject this, that we really need to lead from a health and social perspective. Each of the witnesses has mentioned health, housing and poverty, and at the start, a human rights perspective as opposed to leading from a legal initiative. While a legal initiative has the authority of the law or constitutional authority, it actually is not motivated from a collective support. Do the witnesses agree with that assessment? I would appreciate hearing from them all on that.

It is sobering while also very encouraging that a country that has been at the centre of global drug policy decriminalised 32 years ago and we have been able to protect that core of rights protection for people who use drugs. Even though there are still some setbacks in the sense that administrative sanctions have been put in place, lives have been saved in the sense that so many people who could have gone to prison for the simple act of having drugs in their possession have not gone to prison. The life trajectory for a person who does not go to prison is a life that has been saved. The situation is sobering in the sense that there are still challenges and of course there will still be a backlash. It is also something that we, as Colombians, at least those of us who work in human rights and drug policy reform, continue to be very proud about, that is, having been able to protect this legal standard for so long.

In answer to the question, legal protection is not enough. In our context the legal protection is crucial to enabling other processes to take off. What happened with the Colombian decriminalisation model is that when it was adopted in 1994, drug use was not a prevalent issue for Colombian society. The prevalence of use in Colombia is very low. Only 1% of the population has used drugs in the previous year. It is a very small, concentrated population and drug use is not as widespread as in other areas. Of course drug use has increased. In 1994, drug use was not a social concern whatsoever. It was a very isolated issue.

What we have now is that, even though we have the legal protection, because the model was designed at a time when all of these issues that members have mentioned today were not a concern, there was no design of what health and social services should be put in place to provide wraparound services for people who use drugs and the communities where they live. The legal protection did lift the restriction, so harm reduction services were able to operate, but it was not a state- or public-driven intervention or policy. It was just isolated services, mostly funded by international co-operation and international philanthropy, that were, more often than not, intermittent in their operation, and this left people more at risk. It was never part of a national strategy to provide wraparound harm reduction services. This leaves an invitation for those jurisdictions where these models are just about to be designed to have this in mind, as stated, that the legal protections are one step as part of a larger process. It is a step because we must bear in mind that if a person's conduct or activities are criminalised, there is no way to have a proper relationship with the state. If personal use is still criminalised, there is no way to build trust, reach for services or call for help. Legal protections are necessary but we do not expect them to transform the social and health challenges that come with drug use or with these circumstances. They are one of the many steps that should be designed as part of a more holistic type of intervention.

Rhetorically, it is right to say that relying solely on framing this as a legal issue comes with some pitfalls. I think about how the British Columbia government talked about decriminalisation in the media. It focused almost all its energies on the harms of criminalisation, but it was very hard to see what decriminalisation was for. It was mainly about what it was against, what it was not. That is not an effective framing strategy. People must be told the meaning of this, not just that the last thing was bad but also that this is meaningful, good and produces something. Definitely avoid a purely legalistic framing. Like it or not, drug policy will be - it is to be hoped not always but for the moment - talked about as a moral issue. A lot of people just interpret this as a moral issue, so it is a bit of a tightrope for the government of any country to implement decriminalisation. You must both be constantly talking about evidence but also be able to engage with the moral arguments and, as discussions continue, have a dialogue. There is a tightrope between morality framings and effectiveness and practicality framings. That is the balance that is essential.

We have come to realisation, and this is borne out through research that we have done and other folks have done here in the United States, that we need to change how we talk about these issues. Like Mr. Farrell was saying, for a long time we have being saying "No" to things, that we need to get rid of this system because it is bad and causing all these harms, which is true, and we need to continue that as part of the conversation, but we also need to validate the actual feelings and experiences that the communities are experiencing. There are public space challenges. There are issues around public use, people not having enough housing and people feeling unsafe, and we cannot dismiss those concerns. What we have found is that, for a long time in the United State, you have had to have this tough on crime perspective, or at least politicians have perceived that you need to be tough on crime in order to get elected to office.

Through recent polling we have found that a stronger message is to be serious about solving these issues and not dismiss them. Rather than say it needs to be criminalised, we should come at it by saying these are real issues and we are going to solve them. The way we solve them is not by throwing people in jail. It is by providing access to treatment when people need it, providing community centres where people can go and providing harm-reduction interventions. That polls much better than when someone comes out saying they are tough on crime, that they are going to throw the book at people and that they will never see the light of day again.

We are hopeful that is going to help us to change the narrative here. However, we have a lot of work to do and that is part of the dialogue my co-presenters have been talking about.

I thank the member for the question. I will echo everything that has been said already. I want to focus on the more health-related framing in terms of what is effective when it comes to public messaging. Certainly, approaching drug use as an issue of public health is more effective than the solely criminal legal framework. However, I want to add a bit of nuance to that. There is a distinction between public health framing and individual health framing. I am alluding to how we do not know that it is particularly effective to advance the narrative that everyone who uses criminalised drugs is sick. I can use alcohol as an analogy here. We do not assume that if someone says they are going to the pub to have a drink that they are an alcoholic and need alcohol-use treatment. However, when it comes to criminalised drugs, that is still often the framework we are applying to people. When it comes to changing public attitudes and beliefs and generating support for drug policy reform among the public, positioning everyone who uses drugs as sick and in need of treatment can actually be counterproductive. I am not trying to make the committee members' lives even harder but I would caution against advocating to switch to a solely health-based narrative without being really clear on what that means because calling people sick can actually amplify stigma. There is a distinction between public health framings and individual health framings.

Perhaps this is a different take. Looking at this question of whether we should look at this as a legal issue or a legislative reform issue or a health route, these are not entirely distinguishable. Trying to implement a public health-focused policy is, to an extent, stymied when we are not also looking at legislative reform and having a conversation about policy contexts. That comes back to how certain activities are labelled and how maintaining a criminalised approach to, say, drug possession while also saying treatment responses are essential does continue to create a false expectation. My colleague Ms Luongo spoke to that a bit. It also creates a false expectation for what government can accomplish because if the only two options people are looking at are essentially criminal sanction or treatment, there are going to be a lot of people who are not in treatment perhaps because they do not need it or are not ready for it or cannot access it. That dichotomy creates a space where members of the public can become concerned because they thought everyone was going to go to treatment.

In Canada, we have seen that lead to a proliferation of involuntary detention laws at the provincial level that say people can be detained off the street and forced into these treatment systems despite there being a lack of evidence to support the idea that they are safe, effective and human rights compliant. Looking at the two aspects at the intersection, talking about both the legal aspects of depenalisation and decriminalisation and those public health goals, is really important.

To come back to an earlier question, if we are not only talking about what we see that is not working but also looking at decriminalisation and a health-based approach through the lens of, say, wanting young people to have good employment and school prospects, then great, a criminal record or a health-based harm limits that. If we want people in the trades to be able to get help when they injure themselves and stay in the workforce, great, decriminalisation and a public-health framing and dialogue actually helps with that. If we want families to be strong and communities to be strong, great, changing our legislation and our approach to drug possession helps families stay connected and helps people stay in community in a way that actually benefits the larger community wellness. We cannot pick an either-or in terms of those framings.

To follow on from that, I thought that piece was very good. People use drugs for various reasons and are in different places in relation to it. I have already stated that we need a wholesale element of supports to reduce the numbers of those that engage in this. We also need a whole pile of different solutions for, say, the person using cocaine as opposed to the person at 14 years of age who starts taking heroin because they are trying to obliterate what is wrong in their lives. It is about providing all of that.

Carrying on from something Mr. Russoniello said, it is that idea about having a real conversation, from a political point of view, about solving this issue. Even on decriminalisation, as the Chair said, we can just become involved in something that becomes a legalistic question asking whether decriminalisation is good or bad, depending on what position we take. An issue I have with Ireland from time to time is that an awful lot of people become engaged in a daft conversation and will give out about anybody who engages in a conversation around decriminalisation or looks at something novel. People will accuse them of going easy on whomever and they will probably use a derogatory term for addicts. My issue with those people is generally they do not follow it up with anything. They do not even propose something draconian from a policing point of view, not that I would propose that either. Rather, they talk about continuity of the status quo.

We do need an element of courage. We need to have a conversation with people about their worries and also state what the reality of drug use is in Ireland or anywhere else and how best we can solve it. It is the idea of a health-led intervention for those who need it and whatever other interventions are necessary. Also, from the point of view of dealing with criminality and violence, if we are freeing up the courts and the police from dealing with really low-end pieces that are not necessary, that is a win all round. It is getting that together.

The reason I focused earlier on the conversation around public drug use was that Dr. Leitão da Silva had spoken, from a policing point of view, about the excellent improvement in the operation of the Portuguese model. He said one of the issues that had come up, which could have been confirmation bias, was the idea that there was more public drug use in certain places. My point was that there has been significant back and forth by this committee around the means to deal with that while accepting that if we want to deal with those things that are visible among marginalised people who take drugs, then we need earlier interventions that wrap around families at a very early stage. That is the abject failure. Whoever wants to comment on this is welcome to. It is the idea that we need to have a real conversation about what the issues are, what the problems are and what we can do. Decriminalisation only works alongside multiple other supports. There is no silver bullet with this but we can make things a hell of a lot better for individuals out there and for wider society. I think I have used up all my time.

That is okay. You can ask a question.

Can we start at the top and finish at the bottom?

It would be useful to be clear on the public drug use issue. The British Columbia Centre on Substance Use has stated in a report that there remains no systematically collected evidence saying that public drug use increased after decriminalisation. However, you would not believe that if you read the news.

It is common sense knowledge that public drug use increased, despite the evidence. This goes back to my main point in the opening statement, which is that the perceptions of drug use and of the effects of decriminalisation do not really have anything to do with evidence but they do need to be dealt with. The narrative part is really crucial.

This is about just how easy it is for pre-existing social problems, such as visible homelessness and crime, to become attributed to decriminalisation. It felt like everybody got amnesia here. The day before decriminalisation, everything was exactly the same, and then the day after, it was being said all these problems were being caused by decriminalisation. In Dublin already there is a mismatch between the amount people fear being victimised and a perception that violent crime has already gone up a lot. That does not match with the data. I would worry about this aspect and I could see something similar happening if decriminalisation came in, where suddenly that narrative around violent assaults or whatever would be blamed on it causing these issues. Public drug use is a matter of narratives and not really a matter of the effects of drug policy.

I am thinking about two issues, based on our experience. When we go through the protection of individual rights, it is useful. It is useful because people continue to champion and it gives people agency. The reality of a legal decision that says you have the right to autonomy creates agency, and this has been one of the factors protecting this jurisprudence for so long. In that sense, I do not think it is irrelevant.

There is then the other side of it, in terms of drug use in public spaces. This is a question about what it is people in general care about. The conversation here has mostly been about the availability of public space. There is not that much public space available, and because it is so scarce, there are tensions about who gets to use it. The regulations and the powers that the courts gave to municipalities to decide who gets to use public spaces and when they get to use this public space, which is already very scarce, made that tension very prominent. It is not that it did not exist before, but it made it more visible. People care about the parks and who gets to use them and at what times.

Of course, there is also a huge conversation here about kids in the parks. As many of my colleagues have said, it is not to dismiss that concern. We then turn the conversation around, in the context of, for example, if we were to regulate the time and space where public space could be used by people who use drugs. We have blanket prohibitions that prohibit it 24 hours a day, but then, in theory, there should not be a kid younger than ten or even 15 in a park at 10 p.m. In various spaces, can we get to agreements on who gets to use them and when? Maybe that takes very hyper-localised conversations. It has not been done yet and we are in the midst of those conversations. It is difficult, especially when we go back to whether this is an issue about drug use in public space or if the issue is that there is a responsibility from the state and public policies to make sure everyone has public space for whatever they need to use it for, be it for exercise, recreation or whatever. As there are no policies to make cities liveable, we are all crammed into the spaces and fighting each other for space. That, however, is not the responsibility of the person who uses drugs but the responsibility of the state. In terms of narratives, as Mr. Farrell mentioned, the fight for the narrative of who is responsible for what becomes very crucial. We need to situate the responsibility very clearly on who holds the responsibility to provide space, because, in the end, we are fighting for space.

First, if we are not part of the conversation, then we are already losing the conversation. This has been a problem for a while, at least in the United States, where we have kind of ceded the public safety position to law enforcement and therefore we are not seen as credible any more and law enforcement is seen as the voice on community safety. We need to re-engage in the conversation and reclaim that narrative, because community safety is not just about having law enforcement present in communities and arresting people for drug offences; it is much bigger. It involves a lot more assistance and making sure that communities have the resources they need to thrive. Ultimately, those resources will lead to less need for law enforcement to enforce.

I very much like the idea of the hyper-local community conversations that Ms Pereira brought up. I do think they are going to be super important and those conversations are already happening. Again, if we are not part of those conversations, then, ultimately, they can grow into something much larger that it then becomes much harder to react to.

I also reiterate that when people are offered the solutions that we know work, that are based on a health approach to drugs, people agree with us. They want to see more resources for people who use drugs and to see communities having the resources they need to survive and thrive, and they do not necessarily want to see more jails and more law enforcement presence in their neighbourhoods. They want other resources that are going to help them feel safe.

Mr. Farrell mentioned in his opening comments that the messaging around decriminalisation and other drug policy reform is just as important as the actual policy. If it is not messaged in a way that allows people to understand what is happening, how it is being implemented and the impacts it is having, then that is going to be turned on its head and we are going to end up having to defend ourselves with our backs against the wall. To the extent we can, we need to be joining these conversations and, essentially, we need to be creating our version of the drum beat for progressive drug policy reform and our version of confirmation bias that will eventually build out to the extent that it is changing the hearts and minds of the public at large.

There is a need for a real conversation.

It is critically important to engage with people over sustained periods of time. We use the word “dialogue” because it is not simply disseminating information unilaterally to a population or even having a one-off meeting. That sustained engagement is important because it allows you to tease out what people’s actual concerns are. In my work, I spent many months engaging with one particular community. At the outset, I heard many people saying they hated drugs and the people who used them. Over months of work, I was able to discern that the intense reaction was attributable to the precarity people themselves were experiencing, and there was a perception that people who use drugs were monopolising resources. This competition over scant resources had incited a lot of the anger I heard. That is not something I would have understood after 30 minutes or an hour. I know resources are limited and it is not possible to engage with every population for a long time, but it is about conceiving of how you can systematically have those dialogues to ensure that when you are hearing people’s concerns, they are not being misattributed. This will mean we can actually address them.

Relatedly, there is a real risk, which we have certainly seen in the Canadian context, of overpromising and underdelivering. When it comes to decriminalisation, it is not going to reduce overdose fatalities because the drug supply is still illegal and, therefore, unregulated. When decriminalisation was initially presented, t was framed as the solution to drug-related deaths. We knew that would not be an outcome, but the public did not understand it. When drug-related deaths continued to increase, it provided an entry point for the public to say that obviously decriminalisation was failing, when they were misled about it in the first place. Similarly, supervised consumption sites or drug consumption sites are not going to prevent overdoses because people are still using contaminated drugs. Nor will they solve poverty and things like that. We have to be really clear on what we are actually promising to the public when we pursue a policy.

I am not going to respond technically to this question but in a chatting-with-my-aunt-at-the-dinner-table kind of way. Often, around this question of how we have a conversation, I will start with a question such as asking people if they think there has ever been a time in human history when people did not use some kind of drugs, including alcohol. No, there has not.

Do you actually think there is a version of the world where suddenly no one uses drugs or alcohol? No. This is a thing that human animals do. It is very hard when we see folks in our communities suffering in public and in the places where we want to feel relaxation, joy and community, but these public spaces become intersections of where people have access to when they do not have something else. That is uncomfortable, right? Yes.

The next question is this. Who do we want to be right now and who do we want to be moving forward? That informs everything. Second, we need to be really realistic that with everything we are talking about today - we are calling it substance use, drug policy and harm reduction - we are talking about structural social issues, health issues and socio-economic issues that are way bigger than just substance use per se. Yes, we are talking about drug policy but everything around this conversation is bigger than drug policy. We need to recognise that so we do not end up over-focusing on one policy or one programme because we are dealing with a number of things.

If we can start with those questions, then we can say "Okay, let's get practical". We can talk about prevention education and early childhood intervention. All of that is great but if we agree that some folks are struggling today and that humans have always used drugs of all sorts, including alcohol and other things, what do we do to make our community safer now? Is safety making sure that people have a door to close at night? Great, let us work on that. Is safety making sure that people have somewhere to go where they will get an emergency response if they have an overdose or do not know what is in their drugs? Great. What does that look like and how do we make sure that is actually accessible to people? Is safety in our communities making sure that people have access to jobs and can stay in school and stay connected to their families? Fantastic. How do we help folks stay on those trajectories, rather than cycling through arrest and criminal legal systems over and over or being marginalised within our communities to the extent that they start to lose contact with their loved ones?

Opening on those core principles and asking who do we want to be in this can sometimes be a helpful way to get folks to express that they really do want a more caring, actually safe society and that actual safety is not often based in law enforcement, but is based on building a structure of what makes us safe.

Thank you very much, Mx. Larkin. I definitely went over time there.

I will draw the meeting to a close. I sincerely thank all of our witnesses, Mr. Farrell, Ms Pereira, Ms Luongo, Mr. Russoniello and Mx. Larkin, for their contributions to our meeting. It has been hugely informative.