Roisin Shortall’s stepping down as Junior Health Minister has been welcomed by Dr. Garrett McGovern who believes the now ex-Labour Party member should never have been put in charge of National Drug Strategy.

“I’ve met quite a few ministers with responsibility for drugs and Roisin Shortall was by far and away the most conservative,” he charges. “She’s one of those old school Nancy Reagan ‘Just Say No!’ types who can’t see beyond abstinence. Ireland’s drug problem requires innovative thinking – especially when it comes to heroin – and she wasn’t able to provide any. We appreciated her meeting us, but you got the impression that nothing we said was going to change her mindset. She had her advisors and those were the people she was going to listen to.”
While Eoin Ryan, Pat Carey and her other predecessors had drug policy as their sole responsibility, the structure of the coalition means that Shortall was handed the full health brief.
“Which, to be fair, is too broad for anyone to handle the way it needs to be handled,” Dr. McGovern admits. “Drugs need to be somebody’s number one priority, but by the nature of the job she was given it wasn’t Roisin Shortall’s. The coalition really hasn’t got to grips with the issue at all.”
Having taken power in February 2011, it was four months before anyone in the Fine Gael and Labour press offices could tell Hot Press who was in charge of drug policy. We’ve a long tradition of interviewing senior politicians and Gardai about matters pharmaceutical – Pat Carey recommended that our 2008 Drugs Issue be read in schools – but once ensconced in the Ministry For Health Roisin Shortall’s people declined five Hot Press interview requests, maintaining their boss was “too busy.”
The TD for Dublin North-West’s resignation came just a fortnight after Michael Coleman and Liam Coffey, both in their early 20s, were found dead in a downstairs room in a rented house in Kinsale. The Gardai believe they’d taken a new “brown powder” version of ecstasy, which included both MDMA and PMMA (Para-Methoxymethamphetamine), a stimulant that’s become highly popular over the past 12 months on the UK party scene. A tragic loss of life, which, Garrett McGovern suggests, mightn’t have occurred if Mary Harney hadn’t made the decision in 2010 to close the head shops.
“All the head shop ban succeeded in doing was driving the drug trade underground again where you’ve really no idea what you’re buying, and you can’t take something off the shelves if it proves to be genuinely dangerous,” he proffers. “The head shops weren’t perfect by any means but the products they sold, like Mephedrone, had a track record. You knew what it was, and what it was likely to do to you. The dosages in the pills tended not to vary too much and if you had problems you were able to tell people, ‘This is what I’ve taken.’
“It’s worth stressing that we don’t know yet what these two men died from. The toxicology reports aren’t back yet, so we’re merely speculating as to what was in these pills and whether they were the actual cause.”
Dr. McGovern’s “track record” comments aren’t likely to go down well with the Joe Duffy brigade, but official New Zealand government figures show that one of Mephedrone’s MDMA mimicking predecessors, BZP, was taken 26 million times with no fatalities. Although eventually banned there, it’s been classified as a Class D “low-risk substance.”
“The Irish government could have kept half-a-dozen substances like Mephedrone and BZP legal; researched them thoroughly and then issued guidelines as to their use,” he ventures. “Prohibition doesn’t make drugs magically disappear, as I’ve discovered with people presenting to me with issues surrounding heroin use. Before the head shop ban, very few of them were taking legal highs. Now that they’ve entered into the illegal drug chain, they are in sometimes substantial amounts. They’re buying them from the guy who also sells them their heroin, having no idea what they’re taking.”

People with heroin addiction issues can contact Dr. Garrett McGovern (01) 2916153. www.prioritymedicalclinic.ie