After nine years of NIMBY-ism and civil servants and politicians failing to get their fingers out, the pilot Medically Supervised Injecting Facility (MSIF) that was okayed by government in 2015 finally opened on Merchants Quay in December.

“We appreciate there are concerns, particularly among the local community, but we ask that they work with us on this,” urges Merchants Quay Ireland CEO, Eddie Mullins. “It is a vital healthcare service which will allow us to reach people who are vulnerable, marginalised, and often very sick, by offering them access to medical and nursing services as well as treatment options.  With one death every day in Ireland from a drug overdose, this facility will save lives.”

Located in the basement of Merchants Quay’s current Liberties headquarters, the MSIF will be able to cater for up to 60 people a day and help them access mental health, housing, training, legal and social welfare supports.

As previously reported in Hot Press, MSIFs in Paris, New York, Vancouver, and Sydney were initially met with hostility but are now regarded as an essential local service.

“The concerns in Dublin are pretty much the same as they were 23 years ago when the Sydney centre was being proposed,” says the ex-Commander of Drug and Alcohol Coordination for New South Wales, Pat Paroz . “People were worried about the ‘honeypot effect’ of attracting other people with addiction issues to the area, but nine different studies in eleven years prove that it hasn’t happened.

“Antisocial behaviour, more crime, shoppers being frightened away, commercial and residential property prices being adversely effected; none of what people feared has happened.”

Whilst very much a step in the right direction, the Merchants Quay MSIF is not going to solve the capital’s public injecting and overdose problem on its own.

“Dublin has drug use going on all over the city,” Ana Liffey Drug Project CEO, Tony Duffin, told us in June. “It definitely needs more than one, to my mind anyway, and I know my colleagues in Cork are very keen to open up a fixed site in Cork city centre, but they have to wait until the evaluation is done on the Dublin pilot.”

Tony Duffin from Ana Liffey Drug Project. Copyright Miguel Ruiz.

At present, the Dublin MSIF won’t facilitate the safe smoking of crack cocaine, the use of which has gone up a massive 594% in the past six years.

In October, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Drugs called for personal possession of all illicit drugs to be decriminalised.

Micheál Martin stated during the general election campaign that he was broadly in favour of decriminalisation whilst Simon Harris slapped the Oireachtas Committee in the face by asking: “Does Irish society really want to move to a point where we are decriminalising drug taking? I’m not sure and I certainly don’t.”

The thinking was altogether more enlightened in Germany, Czechia, Switzerland and the Isla of Man which look like joining Malta, South Africa, Luxembourg and Holland in either legalising or decriminalising marijuana. In the USA, meanwhile, Joe Biden quashed hundreds of thousands of marijuana possession convictions.

Bringing things bang up to date, Hot Press can exclusively reveal that American addiction treatment specialist Rick Ohrstrom will be setting up an Irish branch of his C4 Recovery Foundation early in 2025.

Having previously worked on large governmental projects in the UK, Jamaica and the Far East, Ohrstrom and his colleagues will be looking to speak to senior politicians as well as those community groups on the drugs frontline.

The grandson of a famous billionaire philanthropist, he’s a recovering addict and former drug dealer with a stranger than fiction personal story to tell.

Add in the fact that C4 Recovery CEO, Jack O’Donnell, previously managed one of Donald Trump’s casinos and authored the Trumped bestseller, and the blockbuster interview with Rick in our January issue becomes a must-read!

Read the full Whole Hog End of Year Special in the Hot Press Annual 2025 – out now: