David QuinnThe Irish State is not serious about the problem of drug addiction, writes David Quinn
Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, the Government minister with responsibility for our drugs policy, has signalled his support for so-called ‘injecting rooms’ where heroin addicts can inject themselves more safely than out on the streets or in private dwellings where it happens unsupervised and sometimes with infected needles.
There are thousands of heroin users across the country. Around 10,000 of these use methadone either as a substitute for heroin or in addition to it.
One of the factors that has prompted Ó Ríordáin to throw his weight behind the idea of injecting rooms is that several methadone centres are in Dublin city centre meaning drug addicts congregate in the city centre in a way that is disturbing to many of the shoppers who come into the city centre each day and has led to complaints from shop-owners.
These addicts, although they are methadone users, often continue to use heroin and inject themselves in public and often leave the discarded needles on the street where they can be picked up by anyone.
If they could inject in supervised, authorised injecting rooms it would take care of this problem and would also ensure that addicts inject themselves with clean rather than dirty needles. In addition, it would help to ensure that addicts did not overdose.
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Injecting rooms, in other words, seem to have much to commend them, so much so that in Australia at the turn of the millennium a group of nuns in Sydney agreed to operate an injecting room in the King’s Cross neighbourhood of the city (which is something akin to London’s Soho).
However, at the request of Sydney’s Cardinal Edward Clancy the Vatican intervened and told the nuns they could not involve themselves in the running of the injecting room because to do so would amount to “material cooperation with evil”.
The Church’s position is that drug-taking is wrong. It can never be justified.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense. Clandestine production of and trafficking in drugs are scandalous practices. They constitute direct co-operation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law.”
Note the difference between the Church’s attitude towards alcohol and drugs. The Church advises that alcohol can be taken in moderation. Alcohol taken in moderation does not attack the will, which drugs like heroin always do.
The Sisters of Charity in Sydney were not engaged in direct co-operation with evil. A person who supplied someone with heroin not caring whether they became addicted or not would be engaged in direct co-operation with evil.
The nuns were proposing to run the injecting room with the intention of preserving life and in time hopefully to ween some of the addicts off drugs altogether.
In other words, their motive could not have been any more different from that of a drug pusher.
The nuns did, however, intend to facilitate the taking of drugs via the injecting room and this is why the Vatican ruled that they were materially cooperating with evil (a strong word that is frequently used in moral theology, but in more common parlance simply means wrong-doing), and therefore forbade them from operating the room.
I stand open to correction but perhaps there are times when injecting rooms are morally defensible if the only practical choice is between a safe injecting environment and an unsafe one.
We must also consider whether injecting rooms actually work. Again, I cannot claim any particular expertise here not having studied the subject at sufficient length, but in the case of Sydney a long-term evaluation of the injecting rooms there found that they reduced the number of drug-related deaths.
If that is so, then the case for injecting rooms is immeasurably increased so long as the only practical choice is between an injecting room and the street. The question is whether this is really the only practical choice.
At the very most, an injecting room can only be a short-term response to the problem of drug-taking, a step on the road to ‘going clean’.
If, like methadone, it becomes an end in itself then injecting rooms are much less defensible.
Last December the attention of the country was drawn to the tragic case of Jonathan Corrie, the homeless man who died in a doorway near Leinster House.
Most of the coverage focussed on the fact that he was homeless and this was blamed for his death. But then it emerged that his long-suffering parents had bought two houses for him and still he ended up back on the street.
The underlying cause of his problem was his drug addiction. What he needed more than a room for the night was a detox bed, that is, a place in a drug rehabilitation programme of the sort run by one of Ireland’s true heroes, Sr Consilio.
As mentioned, 10,000 people are in methadone treatment programmes up and down the country. That doesn’t include the addicts who are not on methadone.
As at last December when Jonathan Corrie died there were only about 120 detox beds in Ireland, 87 of which were provided by Sr Consilio and Cuan Mhuire.
This is a sign that the Irish State is not serious about the problem of drug addiction. The State gives only €3 million to Cuan Mhuire each year, while €20 million is spent on the methadone programme.
The Government needs to dramatically increase spending on detox beds so as to fill demand for them and then create more demand for them.
Injecting rooms, if they go ahead, are a stop-gap measure at most whether or not they amount to material cooperation with wrong-doing. What we really need is a greatly stepped up effort to cure addicts of their addiction completely. Anything less is a counsel of despair.