THE decriminalisation of heroin to provide addicts with legal "fixes" should be looked at, Mr Joe O'Toole (Ind) suggested.
The drugs problem could be better tackled from the demand rather than the supply side, he said, during the debate on the Bill to pave the way for constitutional change on bail laws.
The Bill was passed.
Drug users would do whatever was necessary to get supplies, said Mr O'Toole. There was one simple way of dealing with the issue, though he was not advocating it.
It was suggested in some quarters that drug related killings would be reduced by the free availability of such substances.
He did not subscribe to this view but he felt the Minister for Justice should have a serious look at decriminalising some substances, such as heroin, and making them controlled substances.
Mr O'Toole said he had looked closely at British experiments where heroin had been used instead of methadone or other substitutes, prescribed by doctors under tight arrangements, and it had been found that recipients lived a reasonably normal life.
One experiment carried out near Liverpool involved two or three civil servants and other people doing more ordinary work. "But they just needed this heroin fix every day to bring them back to normal."
That approach appeared to work well there, added Mr O'Toole.
People who saw junkies and drug addicts on television - and they saw more and more of them nowadays - had come to realise that they appeared like the picture of alcoholics that would have been perceived years ago.
Alcoholism was always associated with people lying in the gutter, but in this day and age people knew that an alcoholic could hold down a job, more or less, and look normal for long periods of the day.
Junkies were just the same, though they didn't look it.
Mr O'Toole said decriminalisation had been achieved abroad by making heroin a controlled substance. We should do more work in that area to see if that was the way to deal with it.
He was not suggesting this kind of approach because he did not know enough about such matters, but he would like to have it looked at.