Addicts are risking poisoning themselves with illegal drugs at a Government-sanctioned ‘shooting gallery’, Dublin City Councillor Cieran Perry has warned.
Perry believes that the city centre drug room run by charity Merchants Quay Ireland (MQI), which allows users to inject heroin and cocaine without fear of prosecution, is simply “maintaining people in addiction”.
During the first six weeks of operation, 233 people visited Ireland’s first ever Medically Supervised Injection Facility (MSIF) and staff have already reported treating 15 overdoses.
Facilitating harm
Perry told RTÉ’s Prime Time that the 18-month pilot project is not “trying to get to the core problem of tackling addiction” and that “referral rates historically are extremely poor from facilities like this”.
He criticised MQI for failing to tackle “personal addiction and to get people off drugs to provide detoxification or rehabilitation”.
The Independent Councillor accused the project of “allowing them, facilitating them, to continue to poison themselves.”
Plans to open the drug shooting gallery have faced strong opposition from the outset over the dangers it presents to local school children, the adverse impact on tourism, and for attracting drug dealers.
Decriminalisation
Following the opening of the facility in December, CEO of MQI Eddie Mullins said: “People who use our services every day — for needles or for crack pipes — are carrying drugs when they go in, and they’re carrying drugs when they leave. The only difference now is that they consume their heroin or cocaine on the facility.”
At the time, the Irish Examiner described it as “the only building in Ireland where you will have to show you have illegal drugs in order to get in. Those with the drugs are breaking the law outside the building, but once they step inside — they are not.”
In a recent statement to Prime Time, An Garda Síochána said possession of controlled drugs outside the centre “remains a criminal offence”, but explained it is “taking a balanced and proportionate approach to policing in the environs of the established MSIF”.
Alberta drug deaths plummet as it shuns decriminalisation