Sir, – Last week's decision by Dublin City Council to deny planning permission for the State's first supervised drug injection centre should come as a disappointment, but not as a surprise ("Council rejects Dublin drug injection centre", News, July 27th). A few truths are worth stating.
The refusal to allow addiction charity Merchant’s Quay Ireland (MQI) to operate a safe injection facility in the basement of the building in which it already operates bears the clichéd hallmarks of Irish policymaking at its worst. It is small-minded; it defers to parochial political pressure at the expense of a clear evidence base; and, by continuing to consign marginalised drug users to the streets, it will cost lives.
The link between the homelessness crisis and the much less visible problem of drug addiction is direct yet rarely articulated. A great proportion of Ireland’s homeless population suffers from addiction of some kind – in particular, the long-term homeless and rough sleepers we see in cities. Moreover, those who succumb to addiction, particularly to injectable drugs such as heroin, are known to be at acute risk of becoming homeless. Denying medical services to these people only serves to marginalise them further, and augments that risk.
One of contemporary Ireland’s most unfortunate hypocrisies is the double standard in which we regard these dual crises of homelessness and addiction.
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While our shocking homelessness statistics rightly generate outrage and shame, the social blight that is drug addiction is often met with indifference: yet these are two facets of the same broader problem of inequality and socioeconomic deprivation. Many of us readily give to charities which help the homeless, yet even basic proposals such as this one from addiction services like MQI – which may seek to help the very same people – are obstructed.
On a fundamental level, this is about class. The structural indifference to drug addiction that is typified by this council decision ultimately reflects a reality that some lives matter more than others in our society. It has been argued, for example, that injection centres will increase crime, negatively affect tourism revenues and, by extension, hurt the local economy. As it happens, this is false: the facility would operate out of a Merchant’s Quay building already frequented by the same people likely to use the service. More importantly, however, this argument makes sense if and only if the preservation of tourism revenue is more important than the lives of hundreds of people who avoidably die each year in Ireland from the medical consequences of unsafe injection.
Those who struggle with drug addiction are among the most voiceless in our society: by and large, they do not lobby city councillors, or write letters to newspapers. They may come from communities scarred by deprivation and intergenerational poverty, and they often have overcome profound personal trauma in their lives. Denying them basic medical services serves only to marginalise them further. Their lives matter as much as yours or mine. – Yours, etc,
Dr DOMHNALL
McGLACKEN-BYRNE,
Waterford University
Hospital,
Waterford.