Gardaí: ‘State should supply heroin to new drugs centre’
GARDAÍ recommended the State provide the heroin for the proposed supervised injection clinic at Merchant’s Quay Ireland in Dublin’s city centre, secret documents seen by the Irish Mail on Sunday reveal.
The documents represent official recommendations made by gardaí prior to the passage of the new law in 2017, and information from an official 2016 Garda visit to injection facilities in Amsterdam.
The recommendation for prescription heroin, similar to prescription methadone, was one of a number of recommendations ignored by the Department of Health before laws permitting the possession and use of Class A drugs at a specific location were passed.
Gardaí also sought reform of public order laws to allow them to better police the centre, which has yet to happen, and the documents complain that in the form that was eventually passed by the Oireachtas, the law would lead to the effective ‘decriminalisation’ of drugs around any injection centre.
The documents argue for a multi-agency partnership to tackle drug addiction and say that Dutch authorities told visiting gardaí that a drug injection facility by itself would ‘exacerbate’ the situation.
The garda who wrote the report said: ‘I was informed by
‘Are we to take drug users at their word?’
Dutch authorities that injection rooms on their own are not a solution and can exacerbate the situation if not part of a wider solution.’
The sharpest criticisms of the then-proposed legislation are in a document, seen by the MoS, which reveals the lessons learned from a visit to injection centres in the Bijlmermeer area of Amsterdam.
‘If the Misuse of Drugs [Supervised Injection Facilities] Bill 2017 is passed as it is currently conceived and written, it will make matters worse, not better. If the Supervised Injection facilities are confined to Dublin city centre, then, as a strategy it will fail both the people of Dublin and drug users alike,’ the report reads.
The document points out: ‘Registered users will have to run a gauntlet from where they purchase the heroin illegally and get to the Supervised Injection Facility before being stopped by gardaí.
‘The current draft of the legislation brought to the Dáil by the Minister for Health is not thorough enough to deal adequately with this issue. In practise, this will lead to a decriminalisation in proximity to Supervised Injection Facilities by users and dealers (who will also be registered users).’
It is for this reason, in the official Garda report – prepared subsequent to the initial fact-finding report – that prescription heroin is seen as the best solution to the grey area caused by the legislation. The report says: ‘The Bill suspends the provisions of Section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977 as amended in the injection centre, but is silent on how an authorised user gets to this centre while possessing a controlled drug. The Bill is also silent on how an authorised user can be properly identified when not at the centre.’ The report asks ‘are we to take them at their word’ that they are authorised users? It says, should possession be decriminalised within a certain distance of the centre, at certain times, it would be ‘impossible to police’.
For this reason the report recommends that ‘if an injection centre is introduced, that all paraphernalia, including the controlled drug are supplied to the authorised user at the centre, thus maintaining the current legal provisions outside the centres’.
The MoS revelations come as the Minister in charge of the project, Catherine Byrne, admitted the project, which is already scheduled to start, could be delayed. She told the MoS yesterday she has not seen the report.
‘I am still waiting to see whatever plan the Government put in place but we’re a long way from it at the moment. The [Dublin City] Council haven’t made up their mind yet, and if they pass it, it will go to An Bord Pleanála.’
Over 100 objections have been lodged with the council.
The Department of Justice said the Department of Health is the lead on the issue and queries should be referred to them. The Department of Health said they could find no record of the Garda report and they would look again tomorrow.
The Garda Press Office did not reply to detailed queries.
IT IS astonishing that Garda concerns about the proposed injection centre for heroin users in Dublin were ignored. In a secret report, outlined in this newspaper today, gardaí warned about the potential pitfalls of legislation that allows addicts be in possession of Class A drugs if they are registered as ‘authorised users’.
What this would mean, in practice, is that addicts would be permitted to carry their heroin in the city centre without fear of arrest or charge, but that assumes all users buy their drugs in the city centre, when some clearly source them further afield. As the Garda report outlines, this would make it impossible to adequately police the area around the proposed centre on Merchant’s Quay, because anyone in possession of heroin could say he or she was on the way to legally inject.
It also serves as a reminder that locating an injection centre in a part of the city popular with tourists will make the problem more visible. Surely there is a better site to locate the centre.
Like the politicians, gardaí are not against the provision of such a centre, and have seen a similar facility working very well in Amsterdam. As they point out, though, for it to work, it needs a multiagency approach, a partnership between the centre, An Garda Síochána, the Department of Health, Dublin City Council, social workers, addiction counselling services and mental health professionals. In isolation, an injection centre is less likely to wean heroin users off the drug.
This has all the hallmarks of a government trying to do something positive, but going completely the wrong way about it. It is shameful An Garda Síochána, which is at the coalface of the scourge of drug addiction, appears to have been ignored.