Belfast Mayor backs ‘shooting galleries’ and legalising cannabis

Northern Ireland should consider legalising cannabis and helping drug addicts to inject heroin, Belfast’s Lord Mayor has argued.

In an interview with Hot Press, a Dublin-based politics-and-music magazine, Micky Murray called for a more ‘liberal’ approach to illegal drugs in the Province.

Last month, Murray’s fellow Alliance Party member Naomi Long, Northern Ireland’s Justice Minister, promoted drug consumption rooms during a visit to a homelessness charity.

Alliance policy

Murray, who admits to having smoked cannabis, believes that the way drugs and addiction are dealt with in the UK “is really behind the times”.

He claimed marijuana wasn’t particularly harmful, and that legalising it would generate income for the authorities through taxation.

The Mayor, installed in June 2024, also said: “We need to look at things like safer injection spaces”. The Alliance Party has repeatedly called for a UK-wide change in the law to allow the opening of facilities where addicts can inject illegals drugs without fear of arrest.

‘Anti-prohibition’

In March, representatives of the lobby group ‘Free the Night’ called on MLAs to liberalise alcohol licensing laws and advocated decriminalising drugs.

The organisation, founded in 2021 by club DJ Holly Lester and Boyd Sleator of Humanists UK, seeks to promote “a more progressive and diverse” nightlife across the Province.

Appearing before Stormont’s Committee for the Economy, Sleator said ‘Free the Night’ adopted an “anti-prohibition” approach to illegal drugs, claiming that “prohibition causes issues”.

The organisation, he explained, would much rather see spaces in venues where people can ‘try to take drugs responsibly’.

Glasgow and Dublin

The Thistle, a drug consumption pilot project in Scotland that opened in January, has already been branded a “harm maintenance service” for failing to refer users to recovery services.

Scottish Government statistics revealed that between January and March, The Thistle had referred just one-in-seven users to support services such as treatment programmes, and benefit and housing schemes.

Annemarie Ward, of addiction recovery charity FAVOR UK, described the figures as “deeply concerning” and said they “expose what many of us feared from the outset – that the Drug Consumption Facility is functioning primarily as a harm maintenance service rather than a genuine bridge to recovery.”

Addicts can now also inject illegal drugs without fear of prosecution at a Government-sanctioned shooting gallery in Dublin.