Government should honestly sell the idea to the public of safe places to inject.
When the Minister of State in charge of the national drugs strategy, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, announced a plan to open supervised injecting rooms, it was viewed by policy analysts as a radical move in the Government’s approach to drug addiction.
The Minister spoke in November of a need for a cultural shift in how we regard substance misuse, of the need for compassion towards drug addicts and how drug addiction should be removed from the criminal justice system.
It was essentially announcing a truce in the war on drugs and a radical forward step for Irish drugs policy.
This message is indeed a groundbreaking, pragmatic approach to an issue that has failed to respond to a variety of policies in the past 40 years, but it is not one the voting public will buy into easily.
Source: Irish Times, 24/12/2015
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