The drug policies don't work

Sean Cassin, who has been involved at the coalface of drug rehabilitation in Dublin at the Merchant’s Quay project for many years, is a man who sounds pessimistic about the drug situation in Ireland generally – although when pressed he prefers to describe himself as “angry”.

His anger comes from a sense of a government dragging its heels. “If anything, the drug strategy has actually wound down over recent years and has suffered as the health service itself has gone into a moribund state,” he says.
Four years ago, Fr. Cassin forecast increased levels of drug use. “Gun crime gangs are fuelled by drugs. In the meantime, the Health Service is merely fence-sitting. There’s no engagement with the voluntary groups working in this area and there’s a lengthy waiting time for just about any kind of planning with them. For example, we offered to increase the number of detox beds, but they seem to have a policy of hitting us with so many hoops to jump through that it delays every initiative you come up with.”
Meanwhile, for all the bluster of politicians, Gardai and sections of the media, the heroin problem gets worse.
“There are no new figures about heroin use in Dublin,” Cassin says, “but it is probably around the 13-14,000 mark. I would suspect it’s up slightly because of new users – whereas there are undoubtedly significant increases outside Dublin, including Portlaoise, Carlow, Kilkenny, Athlone, Limerick and elsewhere.”
Cassin argues that the more arrests that are made by the Gardai the more we increase the opportunities for lower grade suppliers. “In previous times you had people like the Dunne family as the main suppliers. They were established traders, who simply saw drugs as just another product to sell. They had some kind of ethic and an ethos around what they did. Now they’re all in prison or out of action and you have a lower class of criminal controlling the trade. The current policy of putting more and more of them into prison is really just sending them to schools for crime.”
So what’s the alternative?
“Prohibition is a recipe for disaster,” he says, “and I would not advocate free availability either, but dealing with drugs as we do so now is costing money, time and lives. I’m opposed to the ‘decriminalisation’ of drugs. I’d prefer to see drugs legally controlled, just like methadone is now, where we have 8,000 people in Dublin legally using methadone. The alcohol model, although it’s not perfect, is regarded as the most acceptable model for legal control of drugs around Europe.”
His one area of optimism stems from the appointment of Pat Carey as the Minister of State with special responsibility for Community Affairs and the National Drugs Strategy. Over the next three years, Carey has funding of €18m at his disposal for 64 national community and voluntary organisations. “I’m hopeful that Minister Carey might have some impact on the problem. Reducing his brief to Community Affairs and Drugs should enable him to be more focused on drug issues. He seems to be showing a willingness to listen to the voluntary groups who are close to what’s happening on the ground.
“I hope that in the coming months and year the government will put their money where their mouths have been and stop paying lip service to a problem that requires urgent attention.”

The Drugs Policy Action Group’s web address is www.drugpolicy.ie