Plan to make prescription pills illegal for drug users ‘retrograde’

Plans to make possession of prescription medication by drug-users illegal will be counter-productive to assisting the community of inner city Dublin, Trinity College Senator Lynn Ruane has said.

She said the changes would potentially push addicts into further harm because it would involve the forced removal of the drug without replacing it with treatment for the user.

Ms Ruane asked if the legislation would extend to the medical and pharmaceutical industries “as the over-prescription of the drugs has been much more harmful than the illegal street-dealing”.

Minister for Health Simon Harris will bring legislation to the Seanad on Thursday to amend the Misuse of Drugs Acts to make having controlled medicines an offence so gardaí can "disrupt the activities of dealers and protect local communities".

The changes will not affect “legitimate users”, including patients with a prescription, and healthcare professionals.

Addiction programmes

Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin have supported the move. However, Ms Ruane, who has been involved for the past 15 years in developing addiction programmes, said the move was “retrograde and regressive” and would not reach “the intended target of high-level dealers”.

The Independent Senator appealed to Mr Harris to delay the introduction of the legislation to allow stakeholders to have an input and ensure that policy was “evidence-based”.

She said many other countries were moving to treat addiction as a public health issue rather than a criminal one. It was “nonsense” for the Government to plan a public health approach to the use of injection rooms and then criminalise drug- users.

Mr Harris said the Government planned to deliver a “health-based approach to addiction” and he would be introducing laws to provide injection rooms for addicts. However, he said “when An Garda Síochána asks the Government to give it a range of tools to deal with a specific problem in the north inner city I feel obliged to act in that regard”.