Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Very happy to be here. Happy to be invited. Right, well what I’m going to do is start
by looking at what we think we know about drug related crime. Now first of all when
we talk about drug related crime, we’re talking about illicit drugs and the reason
I’m talking about illicit drugs is because certain substances have been made legal through
statute often as a result of international obligations and our main sort of drugs legislation
are based in the 1977 Misuse of Drugs Act. Now later on hopefully in a bit of discussion
we can talk about some contemporary issues. One particular issue is the whole issue of
so-called head shops and psychotropic substances and new substances, every week apparently
a new substance is being created and the challenges that creates for any legislative system or
any system of criminal deterrents. So we’ll have a little chat about that. I want to start,
however, by just talking a little bit about the background to the issue of drug related
crime. And then I’m going to talk about the official picture and that is what people
talk about or what you read in the newspapers often about the, you know, where politicians
say the crime rate is increasing or decreasing etc., I’m going to sort of interrogate that
a little bit and see what exactly that means. And then I’m going to look at what we referred
to as the dark figure of drug related crime, what that picture, that official picture,
doesn’t tell us. And then I’m going to go through the various models that look at
... that have emerged to try and explain the connection between illicit drug use and offending
behaviour. And there are four sort of dominant models that have emerged in the literature
to explain the connection because people sort of assume that’s it quite simple but it’s
actually a very complex area in terms of determining the causative connection between the use of
illicit drugs and offending behaviour. Most people who use illicit drugs don’t commit
any offence whatsoever expect the offence of possession and that’s something that
we can touch on as well. I’m then going to go into a little bit, you know, in a more
sort of topical way looking at how we understand the drugs phenomenon in a Dublin context in
particular. The way in which different sort of perspectives within society have responded
to the problem, the way in which the State has responded, the way in which communities
most affected by the problems have responded and then maybe we’ll start talking about
other different approaches that are debated – legalisation, decriminalisation and various
other models that have emerged perhaps in Portugal or in the Netherlands etc. So hopefully,
you know, be as interactive as you want, feel free to cut across and at the end hopefully
we’ll have time for a bit of a discussion. Now the photographs I’m using and I’m
trying not to be overly academic here so I’ve used photographs that have been taken by a
friend of mine called Ronnie Close. And myself and Ronnie worked on a project in the mid
1990s where we were looking at the whole revival of the anti-drugs movement that emerged at
that time and for those who aren’t familiar with this the drug phenomenon, particularly
***, really impacted in the north inner city in the late 70s and early 1980s. At that
time a movement emerged made up of what was referred to as ‘the concerned parents against
drugs’ because there was a perception that the State and that the police either couldn’t
or wouldn’t respond adequately to the problem. This phenomenon emerged again in the mid 1990s,
particularly with the emergence of ecstasy and the whole rave scene and then the resurgence
in a way of *** back onto the scene and a number of drug related deaths, particularly
in inner city Dublin communities and in sort of economically deprived parts of the area
of Dublin as a whole. And then we had sort of a quite ... what you
might refer to as a watershed and that was the *** of Veronica Guerin, a journalist,
in 1996 by people allegedly connected to the trade in drugs. And that led to a major reaction
from the State in terms of legislation and that sort of approach has really been sustained
over time like there was sort of a renewal of the whole sort of what is being referred
to as ‘the war on drugs’ at that time. It was a major challenge to the democratic
institutions of the State that a journalist was murdered who had been prominent in writing
about people involved in drug related crime and gangland and those involved in gangs etc.,
associated with drugs and this was what was perceived a major symbolic threat to the State
and so it was quite an important watershed. So we’ll talk later about all of that.
Now I’m going to go through ... and then we’ll talk a little bit about the challenge
in recent times as a result of head shops and also the Internet and the challenge that
has created for people trying to legislate against psychoactive substances which are
changing so rapidly and which can be sold so easily over the Internet etc.
Now I’m going to show a couple of graphs and I hope you can see them easily enough.
And this reflects what I refer to as the official picture. Now when you read in the newspapers
or you hear coming up to election time in particular where one group of politicians
are saying that this group are soft on crime and the other group are saying that we’re
*** crime and we’re tough on crime and then one group will come back and say but
drug crimes are increasing or crimes associated with drugs are increasing dramatically, now
what we’re actually talking about in that debate is very little in terms of what actually
is happening but what the statistics, the official picture, is telling us is really
what the police are doing. They are a reflection of law enforcement activity. So, for example,
the statistics that we see are produced largely by Customs and by the Garda Síochána who
have the main responsibility in the State for the prosecution of drug offences. But
those statistics are determined by the resources of these agencies, by their ability to detect
drugs, by the ability of those involved in the trade to conceal their drugs and to evade
detection. So really what these figures are telling us is about what the police do in
response in carrying out their mandate to enforce drug offences, the offences contained
in the Misuse of Drugs Act. And the main offences that are prosecuted are possession, or what
we refer to as simple possession, it’s a Section 3 offence, possession often for personal
use, amounts of a substance, most cannabis and then drug supply, Section 15, where you
are prosecuted for the possession and distribution of drugs. And then you’ve a couple of other
offences that sort of are dominant such as obstruction where you might try and throw
drugs down a toilet or you might try and resist arrest and this is another dominant area.
Cultivation of drugs, personal cultivation is an area that has increasingly been ... it’s
increasingly dominating headlines and we’re hearing about factories where people are producing
their own drugs. Now again is this a real increase in this phenomenon or are we just
seeing law enforcement focusing more on it and this is a very difficult one to know.
Now what you see here if you follow the yellow line, that’s the total drug offences between
1993 and 2005. The pink line is for possession and the blue line is for supply. So what that
tells us immediately is that the main trend in drug offences is determined by possession
offences. That is the bulk of the offences that are prosecuted through the courts. If
you notice something interesting there as well, in 1997 you see that the line jumps
up very rapidly. Now I think that that is because of the *** of Veronica Guerin in
1996 and what you saw was this major reaction by the State but in terms of statistics where
you’d see politicians say we’re winning the fight against drugs etc., what you see
in actual practice is a huge increase in people being prosecuted for the simple possession
of cannabis not really what you would see as a very significant response to that ***.
Now a number of other things happened as well of course which we’ll talk about, but all
I’m trying to illustrate here is the way in which statistics can be so revealing but
also the way in which they can conceal so much of what is actually happening. Now again
this shows you that most of the offences that are prosecuted are for Cannabis as the line
sort of very clearly follows each other, the possession, most of the possession offences
are related to cannabis so most of the prosecutions that we see in the statistics are for people
possessing cannabis for personal use. Now I’m not offering any moral position on this,
that is the law, the law must be enforced, but that is also what is actually happening.
And of course there is a huge debate as to the legal status of cannabis and it is probably
one of the most hotly contested issues within this whole area both publicly and in terms
of the literature etc.
Here we look at prosecutions for *** and prosecutions for *** between 1995 and
2005, over that decade. And what is interesting if you look at the pink line which is ***
through the whole Celtic Tiger era you saw *** moving beyond its sort of idea as
the rich man’s drug contained within sort of a certain section of society. And ***
was seen as a drug that was always associated with those really on the margins of society,
what we refer to as dependent or problematic users. But what you see is a steady increase
in prosecutions of *** until it eventually eclipses *** for the first time in the
history of the State in around 2004. Now another thing that tells us is that this data can
be useful, it can show us trends in what is actually going on and it’s an indirect indicator
of availability. You can compare say police data with treatment data and that can help
you build up a picture of what actually is going on.
This is one that I think is very interesting and this is under 17 year olds prosecuted
by gender from 1995 to 2005. Now if you look at that you’ll see that the number of females
remains very low and relatively steady while the number of males increases year on year
pretty much dramatically over the decade. Now is that because more boys are using or
is it something else? And it doesn’t reflect, say, use of alcohol by girls because what
we have seen in alcohol data is that the use of alcohol by girls is actually coming closer
over that period of time to the use of alcohol by males and sometimes alcohol and illicit
drug use can be sort of comparable to a certain degree. There’s another way that might be
... there’s another explanation. For example, when young people are stopped and searched
for a girl to be searched there needs to be a female guard present but there is a lot
less female guards than there are male guards so possibly it could be that. If I was a teenager
and I was walking down the street with drugs it would be the girl who’d be carrying them
because she’d be less likely to be stopped, to be searched, to be detected and what that
tells us is the way in which statistics or production of the discretionary behaviour
of law enforcement, the way in which often the picture that we think we have is a picture
that has been constructed by the day to day activities of law enforcement. Because I don’t
think that picture really reflects what is going on out there. And you could also argue
from the perspective of young males that that is discriminatory police behaviour and this
young male I think would probably agree with you. (laughter)
Now if we look at drug offences more recently again we have seen a consistent increase – that’s
a bit difficult to read - but the broken line at the top is total drug offences, the second
one is drug possession and the third one is supply and again we can see that supply is
relatively consistent, the trend in the total number is really determined by simple possession.
If we look more recently as well what we can see is – and this is an interesting phenomena
in recent times – a decline as the Celtic Tiger and people’s disposable income has
declined we have seen a simultaneous decline in the use of illicit substances or at least
in their detection. Now I wouldn’t say that that reflects any difference in police behaviour,
I’d say it actually is probably a more accurate reflection of people’s actual use of illicit
substances because other surveys, other studies, have also reflected this decline. Again if
we look here we can see the dark broken line is ecstasy and that’s an interesting phenomenon
because where in the mid 1990s you had huge seizures of ecstasy and it was a very popular
drug, what this tells us is that it was a culturally relevant drug. It emerged at a
particular time, probably associated with the rave culture, it was popular at a certain
time, but something else might be happening there as well and that is the growth, the
emergence of head shops and the use of other substances that might have mirrored ecstasy
or mirrored ***, for example methadrone, which increased and became popular and possibly
displaced the use of ecstasy. Sort of the other line there, the sort of smaller dots
on it, that’s *** and that’s interesting where you see this rapid decrease in ***
and again I would say that reflects the lesser availability of disposable income for people
and the lesser use of ***. And then *** at the bottom is relatively consistent because
*** is a drug that often those who use it who are dependent drug users the economic
circumstances don’t really matter to them, it’s what we refer to in economic terms
as an economically inelastic demand for that drug because if it becomes more expensive
people will rob more to pay for it. And the economic circumstances don’t really matter
because there is a serious dependency or a serious addiction. So it doesn’t as easily
as other drugs, such as ***, it doesn’t necessarily reflect people’s disposable
income.
But what are we missing? Firstly, in general when we talk about crime and the law that
is there politicians, when they respond to crime, maybe they’ll pass some legislation.
Now that’s fine but we know very little about how that legislation is actually enforced.
We know next to nothing about how that legislation is actually enforced. We also know very little
in this country. In the UK, for example, we know that about 1 out of the 4 crimes that
are committed upon people are actually reported to the police. Now the reason we know that
is because what they do, they’ve been doing it since the 1980s, they’ve been comparing
the official picture from the police data with self report studies that are conducted
every year. So they look at the official picture and they ask people were you a victim of crime
in the last year? And they say yes. Well did you report it? No we didn’t. Why didn’t
you? Well there was no point, nothing would happen. There was no insurance potential.
I couldn’t be bothered. The police wouldn’t do anything, nothing would happen. So actually
in terms of the crime picture what we are seeing is only a very small part of the picture
of crime. If we go into certain types of crimes, for example, shop lifting. Only 1 out of 11
shoplifting offences are actually reported. If we look at bicycle thefts it’s even higher.
So in terms of our picture of crime, in terms of the official picture it is extremely limited
in terms of reflecting what is actually happening. And even when people do report crimes that
doesn’t mean they’re actually ever recorded. For example, a study in the UK showed that
40% of crimes reported to the police weren’t recorded. Perhaps the police office at the
time didn’t think it was a crime, didn’t believe it was important enough. Maybe they
were finishing their shift and they couldn’t be bothered and all of these things have been
shown as reasons why this might be the case and again human behaviour is an important
element of this and discretionary behaviour in terms of how our picture of crime is affected.
But the dark figure of crime, that’s what we call this, is much higher for drug related
crime because a lot of drug related crime never enters the official picture. A lot of
drug related offences, like serious ones, are never reported and one of the main reasons
for this is because people are fearful of those involved in the drug trade. Other times
people don’t care, if they see somebody smoking a joint or they see somebody, a crime
is being committed but it’s their business, it’s not really that important and there
are much more serious crimes and we know in this country, of course, that the really serious
crimes aren’t often seen as crimes, for example, tax evasion. I remember having a
conversation with a business man one time and it took me about an hour to explain that
tax evasion was actually a crime and that was a culture that we are beginning to see
the consequences of now, that only certain crimes on the criminal statute books have
ever been enforced. And so crime is also… and who we see as offenders is also a production
of how society determines what’s important to prosecute and what’s not important.
Most of what we know in terms of crime or as we see crime it relates to street level
crime – theft, burglary, robbery, assault, etc. That is the sort of bread and butter
of what we would determine as crime and those we would see as criminals are often referred
to as police property groups, the people that the police prosecute on a day-to-day basis,
usually young working class males make up the bulk of the offender. And if you look
at, say, those in prison, for example, the vast majority of those in Mountjoy prison
come from three postal districts in Dublin. And that is also a reflection of the discretionary
nature of the system. Certain people are stopped. Certain people are arrested. And certain people
the way they talk back to the guards might determine whether they will be actually prosecuted
or not. Or where they are from, the whole attitude test, do they pass the attitude test?
Certain people for the same offence might be likely to get a custodial sentence while
others would not and that is the whole discretionary nature of the criminal justice system and
that makes up our picture.
Now there are four dominant models explaining the link between drug use and crime. The first
is what we refer to as the psychopharmacological model, which says that there is something
within the property of the substance that leads to the offending behaviour. Intoxication
where it might cause criminal especially violent behaviour, now research has shown a very strong
connection between offending behaviour and the consumption of alcohol. There’s a consistent
association between violent crime and alcohol and I don’t think that would be huge news
for most of us here. But the link between offending behaviour and particularly violent
crime has been refuted with regards to *** and cannabis. There is some evidence for crack
***. There is some evidence for *** particularly where people are interfered with
if they have *** in their possession or if they are shooting up there can be a violent
reaction but really the link, the violent link, has not been proven. It is in the social
environment, the context in which drugs are used is a much more important indicator of
violence than the actual psychopharmacological effect of the substance themselves.
The second important link is what we refer to as the economic compulsive or the acquisitive
and this would be one that would be most dominant probably in most of our minds, where people
are committing crimes to feed their habit. This has been proven in terms of research,
international and Irish research that we have seen an increase in economically motivated
crimes after addiction. After people become dependent on drugs and when they are in an
effective, well-resourced treatment programme, for example, methadone maintenance with other
supports, we have seen a reduction in offending behaviour. So again that proves from the other
side, from the treatment side, a clear connection between economically motivated crimes and
addiction.
I’m going to show you a couple of police studies that were done here which I think
are interesting. What they show and what a lot of other data shows is that an increase
in employment and the availability of treatment has seen a very large reduction in economically
motivated crimes here in Ireland. Another important point, however, is that those who
are dependent on drugs are far more likely to be caught offending than those who are
not dependent on drugs. The police know who they are because they’re essentially their
bread and butter, they’re picking them up every day or they’re stopping them every
day. So somebody who is let’s say a chaotic drug user or a dependent or problematic user
is much more likely to be stopped and prosecuted than somebody who is not dependent. For example,
somebody who uses drugs at the weekend, a recreational user who goes to work on a Monday
morning, they do not appear in the statistics. They’re not generally stopped, they’re
not prosecuted etc. And their use of the substance is manageable, they are managing it and they’re
not engaging in serious crime, in any crime beyond possession, so they don’t appear
really. Just very quickly, two studies were done,
one that got a huge lot of attention in 1997. It was a Garda study and they asked a number
of people who they knew were dependent drug users a series of questions and then a sort
of follow-up study, not as strong a study, was done in 2004 again by the Garda Research
Unit. And just to go through a couple of the findings, those who found as crime as their
main source of income, in 1997 it was 59% in 2004 it was 13%. Now at that time, in 2004,
there was a huge increase in employment. There was an almost levelling out of unemployment.
Unemployment was effectively gone at that time. And what that tells us is that people
who are dependent on drugs can also maintain a job so it sort of breaks that sort of stigma
that we have, that people were actually maintaining employment, at some level, and also maintaining
their drug use and it was serious drug use, *** primarily. And again the unemployment
rate was far less in the latter study than in 1997. The drug first used was cannabis
and that’s been fairly consistent, although if we exclude tobacco and we exclude alcohol
cannabis was the drug first used. First introduced to drugs by a friend, and this again is consistent,
is 81% and 86% and that’s very consistent with all studies I’m aware of, that people
are first introduced to illicit drugs by someone who they know, by a family member or a friend.
Now why that’s a very important point is that there is this perception of drug dealers
as the stranger at the school gate, as it’s put, preying on people. Actually most people
are introduced to drugs by somebody that they know and somebody that is close to them and
that must question our whole understanding of the drug dealing enterprise and how people
actually become involved in drugs in the first place. Drugs sourced from a local dealer had
increased from 46% to 76% and what that tells me anyway is that drug markets are far more
integrated into local communities. We must also remember that the mobile phone became
very, you know, everyone had mobile phones and anyone with a mobile phone and a list
of names can be a drug dealer and they’re very difficult to detect from a policing perspective.
So an easier access to drugs was also facilitated by the mobile phone. The number who had been
to prison had decreased slightly and the estimated daily expenditure, allowing for inflation
etc., wasn’t that different. And an interesting finding was the movement from the Punt to
the Euro and honestly people aren’t going to start looking for change on the street,
like you know it’s 12.5 Euro from 10 Punts so what is that, 7.50? You know, that’s
not going to happen. So really what happened was that the legitimate market wasn’t followed
in the illegitimate market, changes that took place in the legitimate markets where prices
largely increased to allow for the Euro in the illegitimate market there was no real
change, it was just rounded figures was all that was important. And systemic crime is
crimes committed as a consequence of the fact that drugs are illegal and there is an illicit
market. And we refer to these as systemic types of crime. How we understand this, we
look at things like drug seizures, drug prices, drug purities, drug roots, price impurity.
If the purity of drugs is lower will the price be lower? And in any studies that I’ve conducted
here anyway and there are very few there doesn’t seem to be a huge connection between price
and purity, certainly not at a street level. If somebody keeps giving somebody crap, as
it’s referred to, they will simply go to a different dealer but it doesn’t seem to
be reflected in changes in price. But you would assume also let’s say for example
if there’s a lower availability you would assume that prices would increase following
basic demand and supply. And yet what we have seen is that drug prices have decreased in
Ireland over the last number of years while availability hasn’t really been affected.
So these are the sorts of indicators we try and use to understand the market.
We have seen sort of a stabilisation of markets over time and often we look at drug markets,
as a simple way of explaining, as involving three levels, you have the import level, you
have what we refer to as the middle market level and then you have the street level.
And then you have what we refer to at street level as open and closed markets, so an open
market might be a market on the street where you can go up and you can be a complete stranger
and they would sell you drugs and there was a time in Dublin, particularly when there
was all those street protests and marches were taking place, when you did have a lot
of that around the city. It still exists but it’s less open in the sense that often you
have to know the person that your getting drugs off so we use the concept of open and
closed markets to describe this type of thing. You might have closed markets in that they
take place in clubs, in night clubs, and again you would have to know the person or be introduced
to the person by somebody who is trusted before you will get drugs. And also one of the reasons
that forces markets from open to closed is because of police undercover operations which
are a major factor of policing in the illicit drug trade where they pose as drug users or
people looking for drugs and as a consequence people are increasingly cautious about who
they are buying and selling from. Local drug markets are particularly important of course,
particularly open ones, because they cause huge community disturbance. People see them
all the time. People who are trying to get treatment have to run through a gauntlet of
drug dealers which is an extremely difficult thing to do. Also for younger people they
might be attracted to the money that is being made particularly in very socio and economically
deprived communities, so open drug markets are attractive to young people and they are
problematic from that perspective as well because they are seen as legitimate. If they
are happening openly without interference well then there must be something okay about
them so they are particularly important. In terms of the involvement of organised crime
and organised crime is a term that I think requires a lot of like analysis because two
people and recently we’ve had legislation on organised crime but two or three people
can be organised. They can arrange something together but does that mean they can be referred
to as organised crime? Yes it does in one way but it’s not what we understand by organised
crime. And this is something, a study that I’m completing at the moment, it’s the
first national study on illicit drug markets which is taking place in four locations around
the country where I’ve tried to address those types of questions – how are drug
markets structured? Who is involved? What sort of roles do they perform? And these types
of questions. Because in a way you have to look at like an ordinary market, like a legitimate
market, because there are massive profits to be made but there are exchanges, there
is supply, there is demand, etc., and these are important.
So how organised is organised crime? Europol has looked, has sort of compared different
types of markets and it says one of the unique things about the Irish market is that it involves
families, that at a certain higher level it is very much centred around families. In a
lot of other countries of course it would be centred around perhaps particular ethnic
groups. Now one study I conducted here in Dublin was on crack ***, there’s a copy
of that at the back, and that found that crack *** initially in around 2005 was associated
with West Africans, initially. Or else people coming back from England who had the ability
to wash up *** into crack and so that was an interesting factor in that it was something
that was associated with a new ethnic group emerging here who had the know-how, who had
the ability, but that is no longer the case now throughout the city. And then there’s
the final model, this is called the common cause model, where illicit drug use and offending
behaviour are common factors of perhaps a deviant lifestyle. One doesn’t necessarily
lead to the other but they are both factors of other things or consequences of other things,
they’re not causally linked but they’re produced by underlining social factors such
as inequality, deprivation, etc. And just to go through this list studies that have
been conducted here since the 1990s, since Paul O’Mahony conducted a major study and
he’s speaking here I think in a couple of weeks on a sociological and criminological
profile of Mountjoy prisoners and he went through ... and nothing has emerged to say
that this profile is any different today, that most were single male age 14 to 30, they
were urban, living in the parental home, from large and often broken families. They left
school before the minimum age of 16. They were from areas with high levels of unemployment.
Their best ever job in the lowest socioeconomic class. They had a high number of previous
convictions and rates of recidivism – where they’ve been to prison before. They had
a history of family members being in prison and they were from local authority housing
and areas of high levels of long-term unemployment. The common cause model is probably the most
under-investigated model but it is also probably the most important. But from a policymaker’s
perspective it is a much more difficult model to handle because the common cause model says
that a drug policy on its own is not going to solve the drug problem or the drugs and
crime problem. Unless you look at all of the socio and economic context in which drug use
and crime take place you can’t fix the problem and so it’s a much more challenging reality
from a policymaking perspective.
Participant 1: Sorry there, if that is the case, and you clearly have this well researched,
have successive governments that the research board has been informing are they are taking
any of this kind of research on board?
Johnny: Well they are. I mean like the National Drugs Strategy combines five pillars including
demand reduction, supplier reduction, treatment, education and rehabilitation and research
so in a sense the model is right and it’s quite a well-respected approach. So it is
acknowledging those multiple dimensions. Now if you’re talking specifically about crime,
however, and the causes and the solutions to crime they can not only be policing solutions
or imprisonment etc., certainly not that, they must be responded to in a more holistic
way. So I think that is ... I don’t think that anybody who doesn’t realise that is
the case but translating it into actual policy is much more challenging because there is
no quick fix solution to that.
Participant 1: Yeah it’s long term.
Johnny: It’s a long-term societal change, it’s not just about introducing the policy
with 50 action points, it’s a much broader societal change that you have to address.
For example, if you look at the initiative that was taken in Limerick, that was a multi-faceted
approach to that problem involving changing infrastructure, looking at education, looking
at pre-school, looking at family support and that is the way you address not only the drug
problem but the crime problem and that’s the important thing that this, the common
cause type of research, has shown.
So just to summarise the link between drugs and crime, most drug users do not commit crimes
other than those of possession. There’s a link between some forms of illicit drug
use and crime and particularly violent crime, some forms of illicit drug use and crime mostly
*** and ***. Most problematic users receive prison sentences for drug related
offences rather than drug offences. And just a point to explain what I mean by that. There’s
a major crisis of overcrowding in our prisons and increasingly this is getting some attention
and a lot of international organisations, recently the Committee for the Prevention
of Torture, has focused on this major issue and the inspector for prisons has written
a lot about this very serious crisis within the prison system. Most of those who are dependent
drug users receive very short sentences of between 3 to 6 months in prison so they’re
obviously not seen as a threat to society if they’re only serving such short sentences.
And clearly given the state of the prisons, although the treatment in prisons has improved
a lot since about 2006, clearly that is not the answer to somebody who is a dependent
problematic addicted person. Now legislation is to be introduced to basically force judges
to consider non-custodial sentences for anybody who they would have given a 1-year sentence
and that has to be most dependent drug users. And that is a question again for society that
we have to look at different ways of treating people who are dependent users and a very
highly stigmatised group of people as well, people will serious health problems. This
is a very important finding, most problematic users began their criminal career before their
drug use so it wasn’t drugs that led them to commit crime, they were already committing
crimes. So drugs didn’t cause crime, their offending behaviour had already begun. Now
drug use and particularly addiction would have increased the rate of their offending
behaviour but it didn’t cause it in the first place so if you’re trying to address
the cause you have to address the cause of crime in the first place. So there’s no
clear causal link between drug use and crime, there is links proven between alcohol and
violent crime and that is clear in the evidence. Again although there is so much concern about
illicit drug use, although we read in our newspapers every day about some gangland killing
and there is a lot of public concern and public fear and there are huge amounts of legislation
out there to address it, we know very little about illicit drug markets in Ireland. We
know almost nothing. The research that has been done, the research I’ve done say on
crack *** was the first study that really tried to address this as a market and the
dynamics of a market and tried to apply that sort of logic to it. If you’re trying to
interfere or you’re trying to intervene and address it I think you have to start approaching
it in that way. What brings people into it? What sort of profits are being made? And these
types of questions, how is structured? How many people are involved? And this research
has been done. Early next year there will be a study that is finished now which is due
to be published by the National Advisory Committee on Drugs and ourselves, in the Health Research
Board, which again looks at drug markets from that perspective, looking at four markets
around the country, you know, one city, one suburban area, one inner city area, one regional
town, to try and get a sense of different types of markets and how they evolve, how
they are organised and structured and how we respond to them. And that’s the other
point, there’s almost no research done on what the police are actually doing. We see
the statistics, the data, the graphs and the trends that I’ve shown, but we don’t know
how many people are stopped and searched. We don’t know how the legislation is being
implemented? How many people are stopped and searched and who are they? How many of them
are arrested? What happens those people?
Participant 2: Have people tried to get that information? I mean I used to work as a journalist
and I know it’s extremely difficult to get information out of the guards, have there
been attempts to get that kind of information?
Johnny: Well it’s not something ... I mean the IT system in the guards has improved dramatically,
in the PULSE system – Police Using Leading Systems Effectively – it’s called. That
has improved dramatically but it was never introduced for the journalists and for researchers,
it was introduced as an operational factor. Now something that is improving is the connection
between the different parts of the system, for example, the police, the prosecutor’s
office, the courts and the prisons because there’s no connection, in terms of trying
to understand it from a research perspective or a journalistic perspective. You can’t
follow people through the system, you know, and that’s something that we have been very
weak at, it is to improve and it is improving slowly but it doesn’t ... and also let’s
say if you go deeper than that, like there’s a huge amount of what we would refer to as
captured data, for example, those being prosecuted, you know, the sort of research that I’m
interested in and the guards worked very closely with this research project in a huge way.
They have cooperated with it. So I think it is not only about that resistance because
it’s not their ... like this is something now that is not only an Irish thing, this
is something that the European Commission, Europol and an organisation called the European
Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon are now collaborating on developing
indicators to understand the connections between drugs and crime and supply reduction efforts
and that is only now really developing. And that’s the other point, we don’t know
how many people are committing offences as a consequence of a drug addiction, we don’t
know that, what we refer to as the attributable cause of the offence. So, you know, in prison
they are drug offenders but most of them, as I said, are in there because of an addiction
and a crime committed as a consequence of that addiction but we don’t know how many.
We know the numbers using methadone within the prison system so clearly they are people
who have a very serious drug problem. But in terms of understanding crime and offending
and criminal justices responses to it our understanding is very limited and from a democratic
or accountable perspective huge resources go into this area and have always gone into
the area. There’s almost never been any sort of cutback on spending on law and order
but there’s very little understanding of how that money is actually spent in practice
so that is a very important issue.
Participant 2: And are you saying there isn’t a culture of ... in my dealing with the Gardaí
there was a cultural issue about giving information, the guards are very closed and compared to
many other societies, I include military dictatorships.
Johnny: Yeah.
Participant 2: Very secretive.
Johnny: Yeah.
Participant 2: So you’re saying that the lack of information from your point of view
is not a cultural issue?
Johnny: I didn’t say that but the culture, there is of course a cultural issue and policing
studies have shown a very inherent conservatism and a great wariness of potential criticism
etc. Now what we’ve had here up until very recently, up until about the mid 2000s, was
that the guards would never give any information on say things like seizures, drug seizures,
or things like that in the local area until the Garda Commissioner’s Report was published.
Now the Garda Commissioner’s Report was usually about 2 years out of day so it was
of no use in terms of understanding what was going on locally. I was involved in setting
up a community policing system in the north inner city in 2000 with the late Tony Gregory
and local guards in Store Street and it’s still functioning very effectively. But it
was I think January 2000 when a member of the local Garda Drugs Unit stood up and he
explained to the local people, about 300 local people, the number of seizures that had been
made in the last 3 months in the area. Now I was flabbergasted at the time because that
was something that had never been done before. Now it didn’t tell them a huge amount they
didn’t know anyway because they live there but I think what the Gardaí didn’t realise
was the importance in terms of communicating to people of just showing them that you’re
actually doing something rather than just saying it but showing that you ... and it
is a form of accountability. I think what you could probably say is, and this isn’t
only just institutions like the Gardaí, there has never really been accountability in that
sense here in any of the institutions that have sort of formed the identity of the State
and that is something that I think is now breaking down. Clearly it is breaking down
and people are demanding it. But I think that probably is part of the picture.
Now in terms of our debates about drug related crime and drug crime and all of these various
things I think one thing that has often been missing is a perspective on those who are
most affected by drug related crime. The drug problem has always disproportionately impacted
on the most vulnerable communities in the sense that they are already suffering numerous
aspects of socio and economic problems – low education levels, early school leaving, high
levels of unemployment, etc. And they are also the greatest victims in terms of drug
offending. There isn’t this romantic idea that people in certain areas go out to other
areas and rob from other areas and that is one of the things I think that really led
to the huge marches that emerged in inner city Dublin in the 1980s and the 1990s was
that *** changed the complexion of crime in a lot of these areas because people were
now robbing on their own people whereas traditionally there had been a sense of well you don’t
rob on your own. But the drug problem it completely undermined that whole romantic notion and
I think that is a perspective that responses have to look at it. For example, one of the
major issues at the moment I believe – and this was sort of a picture of how communities
responded at that time, you know, having marches, marching on Government Buildings, setting
up vigils out on the street to stop people dealing, marching on people’s houses who
they alleged were drug dealers and evicting them from their houses and on one occasion
killing somebody who was an alleged dealer – and that’s the whole aspect of vigilantism
as well, there is that potential but what it did show was a serious crisis where a lot
of communities felt we’re not noticed and our problems are not addressed. And I think
there is a sense that their problems, as the saying goes, they were over policed but they
were under protected in that their priorities, their crime priorities, were not really being
reflected in what was happening and what the criminal justice system was doing. After Veronica
Guerin the State response was to symbolically assert itself, that we are winning the war
on drugs. The Criminal Assets Bureau was something that was quite original and was something
that has been followed up in many other countries and a range of new drug laws were introduced
in the wake of that, of Veronica Guerin’s killing. But again communities were asking
when you actually look at the legislation in practice are our priorities actually being
reflected in the policing process? And the police initiative I mentioned there earlier,
in 2000, was the first time that you really had a sort of form of local democratic accountability
in Store Street which is still going on.
Subsequently now since 2005 there has been the Garda Act, this is quite an ambitious
poster of the Labour Party in 1997, yeah the 1997 elections, “1992 drug barons reign,
1997 drug barons run”. Now there’s a number of reasons why they might have run, one reason
is that the source of drugs are not in Ireland they are often in Spain or they’re in Portugal
or they’re in the Netherlands so there’s a logical reason to move. Now recently I believe
as a consequence of the organised crime legislation that is something that seems to be causing
some concern and also the ability to use different forms of evidence, particularly photographic
evidence and telecommunication evidence in prosecutions, is something that is apparently
causing some concern. But drug markets have changed as well, they’ve become more hidden
and, as I said, the mobile phones facilitated this. They become more credit based where
people are giving drugs on tick or on credit, more mobile, but they become more violent.
A lot of research has shown that. And they become much younger, much younger people being
involved and much younger people being brought in to keep a look-out, to hold on to drugs,
to run drugs between various people but being brought into the enterprise at a much younger
age and some say that is one of the reasons it has also become more violent. And where
people to get debts of very small amounts of money are prepared to use levels of violence
that historically only 10 years ago you wouldn’t have seen in the Irish drug scene.
And some of the issues that are there of course that need to be addressed, one of the major
issues I think that hasn’t really sort of got national headlines as of yet I think is
the issue of intimidation and violence. Drug related intimidation of not just users but
their families in response to drug debts and economically as the market decreases people’s
determination to recoup their debts becomes much more heightened and there have been some
studies done by the Family Support Network and by Citywide Drugs Crisis Campaign which
has been trying to put some sort of focus onto this really serious issue. But again
I think the fact that it isn’t really in the mainstream yet shows you the way in which
the drug related crime problem how it’s prioritised. This, I think, is the main priority
for a lot of communities around the city, addressing the issue of intimidation, but
it’s not really on the national thing. There’s an article at the back I wrote there in our
journal Drugnet Ireland, which you can get your hands on, where I’ve written up on
a recent conference which looked specifically at this issue of intimidation.
No-go areas, community stigma, the development of gangs, particularly the involvement of
young people and the emergence of sort of gangs around drugs, fear of reprisal which
is a major issue in terms of the State, and the drugs strategy, a lot of it is based on
local drug taskforces requiring people in local communities to work with the organs
of the State to address the various problems but fear of reprisal and the fear of seeing
to be associated with responses of the State breaks down that cooperation or that willingness
to cooperate and there’s a major democratic problem in relation to that. So in terms of
things like intimidation and drug related crime and fear there is a serious requirement
of the State, if it wants to sustain some sort of policy response, it has to address
issues of intimidation.
Okay, I’m going to move on and conclude. I think one of the things we have to question
in terms of responses is on whose response is the behalf being made and how do we prioritise
this issue? First looking at it, analysing it and then prioritising, what is the important
thing to start with because you do have to prioritise. You can get a copy of this presentation.
I just want to just finish with this slide. Some of the debates of course doing the rounds
of course are like legalisation of drugs and some argue that will take the market from
underneath the gangs and the dealers, decriminalisation where you introduce different sanctions. Portugal
is the first country certainly in Europe if not in the world to decriminalise all drugs
and so people are now sent to a form of sort of committee that deals with issues of treatment
etc., but they are taken completely out of the criminal justice system. De-penalisation
where you don’t send people to prison if they have a health problem, that’s what
you address, you don’t incarcerate them as a consequence. The Dutch solution which
has virtually legalised the consumption of drugs in regulated conditions in what they
called ‘Coffee Houses’ but a very interesting solution in that in the Netherlands the front
door is legal but the back door is illegal, as they say. The supply of drugs to the coffee
house remains illegal but the consumption of drugs in the coffee house is legal. So
this is a sort of a form of, you know, and then you’ve things like community-based
mediation, problem solving, local community policing, etc. I’m going to finish on that.
So feel free to question or comment about it.
Participant 3: What’s the data from the Portuguese solution and the Dutch solution?
Is it helping?
Johnny: Yes, I think the data is generally fairly positive. There’s a few articles
have been written about that. Say the Portuguese situation first in that there has been no
increase in drug use, that’s one thing. There has been no increase in drug related
deaths which is a very important indicator. And the Netherlands has shown a consistent
decrease in drug related deaths. Because what the Dutch were doing, and this was as early
as 1966, was it wasn’t about legalising drugs, that wasn’t their interest, their
interest was about separating markets so separating the cannabis market from more serious drug
markets and that is something that they have succeeded in doing. Now they’re under a
lot of pressure. One of the problems at the moment is because of the much higher purity
of cannabis and in the Netherlands in particular and that’s a concern that a lot of other
countries would have. A problem for the Dutch of course is they’ve come under huge pressure
from other European countries to reverse their approach and they seem to be yielding to that
pressure and there’s some internal pressure as well, there is some political division.
Now as far as I’m aware there’s no political party in the Netherlands that wants to reverse
that general approach but what they’re talking about doing is making them only accessible
to Dutch people, for example, so that they’re not a tourist attraction for non-Dutch people.
So those are the sort of issues. The Portuguese process I’ve read everything that’s been
written about that and that also seems to be a very ... and I’ve seen them actually
working and it seems to be a really interesting process. Now one of the problems associated
with this and like it’s about 10 years now in operation is the message it gives out to
young people and this is often a very difficult thing to address, does that mean drugs are
okay and that is something that they’re sort of looking at at the moment. And it’s
a very difficult one to square, how do you actually ... because you don’t know what
message the more deterrent or prohibitive approach is giving, what message is that giving?
But the more liberal approach that is also giving a message that needs to be considered
and I think also the coffee shop phenomenon is a very interesting concept that I think
challenges anybody who calls for a liberalisation of drug laws because one of the concerns about
that here was that a lot of people could avail of drugs in these coffee shops that mirrored,
for example, ***, methadrone. But many people started using mind altering substances
who would never have done otherwise except alcohol so they would never have experimented
with substances like that but the fact that you could go into the city centre and go into
a main street and go in and buy your drugs and go into the night club next door it did
give a message to people that that’s okay and that was a major issue. Now they’ve
been pretty much all closed down but I think anyone in a free market economy who argues
for legalisation must also confront the fact that people will then sell aggressively. They
will sell aggressively. Look at alcohol, you know,
alco-pops, people are making profit and there’s huge amounts of profit to be made. Of course
there’s massive profits in an illicit market but there’s also massive profits in an illicit
market. Like one of the things about the head shop phenomenon was the amount of money that
was seized. Like, for example, there was one burned out in Capel Street and they seized
I think it was half a million from that shop and if you observed them there was a huge
trade so there’s a lot of money to be made and this is a free market economy so ... and
there will be aggressive advertising and so people who argue for a more liberal approach
have to look at that. Now that is not to say that those arguments aren’t valid but people
come often from a harm reduction approach and they’re saying that the current system
isn’t working because people are generally ignoring it and so the harms of their use
is hidden so we have to try and bring it more out to the open so we can address these harms.
Another argument about the coffee shops was that once you made them illegal all the substances
would simply be transferred into the illicit market. I don’t think that has really happened.
Methadrone I’d say it is very likely it has happened but a lot of other substances
seem to disappear. And then of course there’s the reality that people are getting drugs
over the Internet so how do you challenge that? How do you legislate for the Internet?
Participant 4: Just around the thing around the inelasticity of *** in particular and
it’s kind of counter intuitive to think that it would be elastic because it’s like
the archetypal drug of addiction and people are very dependent on it but interestingly
about this time last year or a little bit later there was a good 6 month drought of
the availability of street *** and it just became unavailable really, now that threw
up its own consequences like people getting ripped off buying stuff that just wasn’t
*** and whatever *** was around became very, very pricey but one of the things I
would have expected and you heard anecdotal evidence of it happening but it didn’t come
across in the statistics that people hammered treatment centres then, the people that would
have been addicted to street *** then all of a sudden would have gone to their local
treatment centre but the statistics at the treatment centres didn’t reflect that so.
Johnny: And they’d be going there for Methadone, yeah?
Participant 4: Yeah. So I don’t know what that was about, maybe some of it is to do
with some *** use being discretionary, maybe people using *** on top of their
methadone maintenance and using *** on dole day or when they’ve had a few bob extra,
you know.
Johnny: Yeah.
Participant 4: And then that discretionary use went out and it might have diverted into
other drugs, you know, if you like benzodiazepines and things like that.
Johnny: That’s what I was just thinking that it’s probably I would say I mean that
drought they say was because of a drought in Afghanistan, the crop being affected in
Afghanistan how that then rebounded here, but that I would see it as the polydrug issue,
that was very interesting, there was a study done in the south inner city called A Dizzying
Array of Substances which showed how in a very small ... and often people there’s
a perception sometimes that you’ve got a *** market and you’ve a cannabis market
and never the twain shall meet but I think you know yourself better than I do that that’s
not the case and so it is probably that people were moving maybe for a similar hit or something
similar but it’s an interesting like factor, did that increase the number of people seeking
methadone? People who were happy to use *** and weren’t interested in methadone.
Participant 4: You would imagine there would have been a spike and there wasn’t in the
statistics according to the treatment centres.
Johnny: Yeah. Have those statistics been published yet, have they?
Participant 4: Yeah, for that time period it must have been about 8 months ago now or
10 months.
Johnny: Okay, yeah. It would be very interesting to check it out.
Participant 5: Johnny hiya.
Johnny: Hiya.
Participant 5: You mentioned about the drugs taskforces earlier and I know that a lot of
the funding was cut very recently and most of their funding I think would have been cut
in most of the organisations and I wonder is there any statistics or data out there
yet about the impact that’s having on communities? I mean I’ve read anecdotal stuff but I don’t
know if there’s anything ... is it too early even to say?
Johnny: Well you see there’s a guy, is it Harvey, I know his second name is Harvey,
who has written a lot on this, on the actual social infrastructure of communities or the
social capital as Putnam would put it and how those taskforces and all of the voluntary
work around those taskforces is so important for those communities and so that tiny amount
of money that they’ve cut back the effect that has, it has a multiple corrosive impact.
Now he’s the only one I’m aware who has really written about that so far but in terms
of other like data has that ... I don’t know, I think that would require that type
of sociological analysis that he applies. And the thing is that it’s probably the
most well spent money is money spent at that local level.
Participant 6: In your recent research is there much evidence of crystal *** use?
Johnny: No, there was a lot of fear of crystal *** and crystal *** was something ... like
in a European context the main area, or main country, is the Czech Republic and I think
Norway or Sweden were sort of standout countries in terms of crystal ***. The UK has had a
big problem with it as well but there was a concern about 2 years ago that because it
was sort of emerging in the UK that the guards felt there’s an 18 month transfer period
but UK have had crystal *** problems since the 80s and it’s never really taken off
as a big problem here. Now there have been a number of seizures but it hasn’t seemed
to have taken off and any research I have done it’s been talked about and mentioned
but nothing like say crack *** has been mentioned and there we’ve seen since it
emerged really in 2005 it is now available certainly in all taskforce areas around Dublin
and it is a market that is a very stable market and a very lucrative market. Like while prices
have fluctuated in other drugs crack is something that has been very steady and very lucrative
because people are, you know, there’s such a demand for it, such a repeat demand. But
in terms of crystal *** and it’s also probably more concealed, you know, if you can call
it a market because it can produce it in their home. Like I remember watching a video once
where the only way police seized crystal *** was when houses blew up because of the mixture
of chemicals and so it might be something that is concealed possibly within certain
ethnic groups who have a cultural background of using crystal *** but I don’t think
it has transferred across to mainstream Irish society.
Participant 7 Yeah, I was just wondering and it’s the same as you were talking about
just now, I’ve read in the media about this new phenomenon in the UK that they label it
as bath substance but ...
Johnny: Bath salts, yeah.
Participant 7: ... yeah, yeah has that reached Ireland already because it’s a very strong
substance?
Participant 4: Been and gone.
Johnny: It’s been and ... yeah, it’s been and gone in that like the substances in what
were referred to as head shops were nearly always marketed as something else like bath
salts and things like that so that’s how the head shops were sort of getting around
it. Now the new legislation that was passed in 2010 prohibits that so now most head shops
– and I think there’s about 10 of them out of whatever there was 80 or 90 or more
are remaining open and that’s largely because of that new legislation that was introduced,
the Psychotropic Substances Act, 2010. We’ll just take one final quick one there.
Participant 8: Just very quickly, are you optimistic or pessimistic for the future?
Johnny: Optimistic. (laughs)
Participant 8: In relation to drugs? (laughter)
Johnny: I think one issue that I’ve mentioned that I think is really an important one is
the issue of intimidation because that is really breaking down families in ways that
mainstream society and the government doesn’t seem to really appreciate yet. And I think
there really needs to be a concerted response to that because once that is allowed and particularly
if the whole concept of gangs and territorial control is allowed to develop well then it’ll
turn a corner and it will really be very difficult to come back. I mean there was a study done
recently in Limerick called Understanding Limerick and it showed the way in certain
parts of Limerick and it was a very organised destruction of a community to facilitate drug
dealing. And there was a very sort of conscious disintegration of areas to assert control
by people involved in the drugs trade and I think if that’s not grasped, you know,
we have a sort of a ... I think we can see what can happen and if that isn’t grasped
and I think the issue of intimidation is something that really has the potential to, you know,
where you have people coming together in the past in large groups and sitting in meeting
rooms like the photographs I’ve shown you, it’s very difficult to get that because
people are so fearful but I think without that, without that willingness of people to
come together and to address it the State can’t address it on its own, they certainly
can’t. So that would be ... I wouldn’t be optimistic unless that is addressed.
Facilitator: So I’d just like to say thank you very much for coming along and thank you
very much to Johnny for giving the talk.
Johnny: You’re very welcome. Okay. (clapping)