Peter Reynolds

This week the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drugs Use held its first meeting.

In private. This speaks volumes about the way politics is conducted in Ireland.

It’s presented as “standard practice to attend to housekeeping and procedural matters”. But it’s all done at our expense. There is no good reason that these discussions should be secret. They are our business, not the ‘private’ business of those whose wages we pay.

There is every cause for concern. Everything that this government and the Oireachtas as a whole does on drugs policy warrants the closest scrutiny.

I do not know anyone who has any faith at all that this process will be handled honestly and we see from the beginning that it will not be open and transparent.

The recommendations of the Citizens’ Assembly have already been brushed aside. Varadkar kicked the can as far down the road as possible and now we have a Taoiseach who is authoritarian, regressive and very fond of the mindless ‘tough on drugs’ sloganeering that has failed for 50 years.

And let’s remember, the Citizens’ Assembly was hobbled, rigged and sabotaged from the beginning. The agenda was manipulated so it was never about ‘drugs use’, it was about drugs treatment, so focusing only on the 10% of drugs users who are problematic, ignoring the 90% of users who, as Prof. Jo-Hanna Ivers explained right at the beginning, cause no harm to themselves or others and actually gain benefit from their drug use.

So it was set up to fail from the beginning. The equivalent of planning alcohol policy on the experience and need of alcoholics.

There was just 15 minutes given to one presentation on cannabis regulation while the gardai were given three bites at the cherry, hours each time, to preach falsehood, moralising and an utterly outdated approach which is proven to fail. Ireland now has a reputation for drugs gangsterism that spans the world and it’s deluded to think the gardai have anything of value to offer. Aside from a few academics and Dr Nuno Capaz from Portugal, not a single, working, practical expert on drugs policy was given a platform.

Then the voting system was rigged!  Clearly this was organised to defeat what was obvious – that, even in the face of all the manipulation, the assembly intended to recommend decriminalisation of all drugs and a regulated cannabis market. So we had the absurd conclusion that drugs would be “decriminalised but remain illegal”. You really couldn’t make it up!

Of course, before the committee reaches any conclusions we will almost certainly have an election. This process has been twisted, corrupted, manipulated and sabotaged all the way through.  I’ve only touched on the most egregious examples. Many other tricks were pulled which should never have been allowed.

Meanwhile the handwringing and alarm from government and media about the consequences of bad drugs policy continues. The HSE is engaged in drug war propaganda while simultaneously ensuring the failure of both the MCAP and ministerial licence schemes for accessing prescription cannabis.

The media systematically misrepresents the issue. In particular, RTE’s coverage is as far from balanced as it possible to conceive, yet its Journalism Guidelines are peppered with words such as ‘balance, fairness, objectivity and impartiality’. Certainly on drugs and drugs policy it falls far short of these standards. It is obsessed with the partial and opinionated views of Bobby Smyth, Ray Walley and other members of the Cannabis Risk Alliance, the extremist anti-cannabis lobby group. The nonsense and misrepresentation they are allowed to get away with about research and data is a scandal.

The press is allowed to be partial and there is no better example than this week’s article in the Independent ‘Almost 5,000 hospitalised with mental disorders after taking cannabis products‘. The awful journalism, confusing cannabis and synthetic cannabinoids is unforgivable, so dreadful you would think it is deliberate. And here again, the only named commentary is from Bobby Smyth and Ray Walley.

Is Irish media so blinkered that it thinks only clinicians or gardai have any role in drugs policy? The subject requires expertise from many disciplines. Why are experts in drugs policy itself never interviewed?

The Irish Times is similarly biased. Occasionally we get more balanced and intelligent coverage from the Examiner and the Journal.

It is difficult to be optimistic about any improvement in drugs policy in Ireland. Fine Gael is a hopeless case. Fianna Fail has a few bright lights, notably Paul McAuliffe and James Lawless. Labour has Aodhán Ó Ríordáin. The Greens have Neasa Hourigan. There is Gino Kenny of People Before Profit, Violet-Anne Wynne, the independent TD and Lynn Ruane, the independent senator . But there are very few more who seem to be properly informed. Most prefer the knuckledragging ‘tough on drugs’ approach of Simon Harris.