An Cathaoirleach Michael McNamara: The topic of this meeting is engagement on decriminalisation, depenalisation, diversion and legalisation. This is the first meeting on this topic and it will be followed by a number of other such meetings on the same topic.

I welcome our witnesses, who are gathered patiently online, Professor Alex Stevens of the University of Kent, Dr. Niamh Eastwood, executive director of Release, and Ms Ruby Lawlor, executive director of Youth RISE. They are all very welcome to join us online.

I invite Professor Stevens to give his opening statement.

Professor Stevens: I am professor in criminal justice at the University of Kent. I was previously a member the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and also president of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy.

With Dr. Caitlin Hughes of Flinders University in Australia, I carried out a review alternatives to criminalisation for simple possession for the Irish Department of Justice and Equality in 2018. In that report, we identified four alternatives to criminalising possession. The first was depenalisation, which involves keeping the law in place but making the practical decision not to enforce punishments against people for low-level drug possession offences. That differs from diversion, which can be done either de facto or de jure, and involves replacing criminal punishments with a therapeutic or educative intervention. The third alternative is decriminalisation, which involves a de jure change to the law to remove the offence of simple possession from the criminal law. The fourth alternative is legalisation, which involves eliminating penalties not just for possession but also for the sale, production and distribution of these substances.

That four category taxonomy provides an even wider range of complexity within each of these decisions. For example, to whom are these alternatives to be applied? Is it to children, adults or both? There are some places that, rather bizarrely, maintain criminalisation for children while decriminalising use for adults. This seems to be the reversal of what we would want.

There is also the question of which drugs will be covered. Is it just cannabis or will a wider range of substances be involved? For all of these drugs, will there be weight threshold that determines the difference between possession and supply or will the police and prosecution need to prove intent to supply? The threshold comes with a whole range of complexities. It is difficult to define a weight that robustly distinguishes between possession and supply.

There are also issues related to if, for example, it is diversion, what diversion will there be? Will it be a drug awareness course? Will it be a one-to-one intervention? Who will pay for it? Does the person who is diverted have to pay? What happens if the person does not comply with the diversion?

How many times will the diversion be available to people? If it is decided that it is not a good thing to punish people for drug use, it also does not seem to be a good idea to punish them for not complying with something that is about their drug use. If it is legalisation, then there is a range of issues to discuss.

There is a trade-off between eliminating the illicit market by allowing a more commercial approach which involves advertising and price promotion, as there are for other products in the market. The benefit of that is to minimise the size of the illicit market and all the harms that come with it, but it might increase drug use. Therefore, one might be tempted to legalise but with very tight regulations, as has been done in Germany with cannabis. The risk in this case is that the illicit market is not eliminated because people still prefer to use the wider range of substances and lower prices in the illegal market. Policymakers have, therefore, a wide range of options and options within options to consider.

The broad lesson from the more than 50 countries that have tried these alternatives so far is that reducing the punishment for simple possession of drugs does not increase drug use and, therefore, related harms. It seems that such alternatives provide a net positive, in that they reduce the harms of criminalisation, without increasing use or related harms.

Legalisation is a more complex option. There is some evidence of increased use among older adults, for example, in the states of the United States that have legalised cannabis. There are interesting experiments going on comparing provinces of Canada that have different models of legalisation of cannabis. An experiment has just got under way in the Netherlands with a regulated supply to the coffee shops. There is a lot to consider and a lot to learn. I look forward to our discussion today....

[Click here for the full debate]