Former drugs minister Róisín Shortall has said the Government does not have “the political will” to implement two-year-old plans to tackle legal drugs implicated in over 150 deaths a year.
The ex-minister of state at the Department of Health said there had been “no progress” on plans she signed off on in September 2012 to crack down on the booming street trade in prescription medication.
Benzodiazepines were implicated in over a third of all drug overdoses in 2012, or 123 of the 350 poisoning deaths.
So called z-drugs, which are hypnotics or sleeping tablets, were implicated in a further 27 deaths in 2012.
In 2011, the figures were even worse, with ‘benzos’ involved in 173 deaths and z-drugs involved in 31 deaths.
Source: Cormac O'Keefe, Irish Examiner, 27/12/2014
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