As the Deputy may be aware, in May last, the national advisory committee on drugs, NACD, produced a report entitled Review of Harm Reduction Approaches to Minimising the Sharing of Equipment Used to Administer Drugs. The report was commissioned in response to action 100 of the National Drugs Strategy 2001-2008 which called for research to be conducted into the effectiveness of new mechanisms to minimise the sharing of equipment, for example, non-reusable syringes and mobile syringe exchange facilities within particular cohorts of the drug using population, that is, among younger drug misusers, within prisons etc.
Arising from the report, the NACD recommended that service provision for drug users in prison should mirror the range of treatment and harm reduction approaches which are available in the community. In this regard, the Government has been developing drugs services in prison, including methadone maintenance, over recent years. However, full implementation of this recommendation, in particular in relation to needle exchange, obviously poses serious issues within a prison environment and will have to be very carefully examined. Policy regarding drug misuse in prisons is a matter for my colleague the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
With regard to supervised drug consumption rooms, the NACD report found that the evidence on their effectiveness is inconclusive. This is in line with the conclusions of the National Drugs Strategy 2001-2008, although the strategy did call for this issue to be kept under review and for the results of research, both national and international, to be monitored. The NACD report also acknowledges the view of the INCB, International Narcotics Control Board, that drug consumption rooms violate the provisions of the international drug control conventions to which Ireland is a party. Therefore, the position of the Government has not changed and, accordingly, there are no plans to introduce such facilities.
The introduction of consumption rooms would require changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act, responsibility for which lies with my colleague the Minister for Health and Children.