Urban Development
Dail Éireann — 2022-03-29
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Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

As the Taoiseach knows, one of the biggest issues in areas of significant deprivation is the impact of drug addiction on individuals, families and communities. I have often heard Government spokespeople pay lip service to the idea that we need to move away from the criminal approach to dealing with this problem and take a health-related approach but, in fact, we have not done that at all. I wonder when we are going to realise that the so-called war on drugs is a disastrous failure and that we need to start to deal with this as a health issue. We cannot bemoan criminal activity if simultaneously the State effectively criminalises huge cohorts of our young population. That is what we are doing and the consequences are a total failure that impacts particularly the most disadvantaged areas. When are we going to get serious policy change in that area?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-03-29/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:50:17+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-03-29