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IN A LANDMARK report last week, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Drugs Use proposed repealing section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977. This would mean that people can no longer be arrested, prosecuted and sentenced by the criminal courts solely for possessing drugs for personal use.
As the Committee’s chair, Gary Gannon TD, outlined in his foreword, this would not be a marginal adjustment to drug policy. The idea that it helps to punish, or threaten to punish, people for using drugs is embedded in our psyche. Many people have genuine concerns about changing the law.
Decades of research shows that criminalising people causes additional harm, without improving health or decreasing problem drug use. But before outlining what research indicates are the likely effects of repealing section 3, it is important to clarify exactly what that would involve.
Disappointingly, governmental responses to the report have been littered with inaccuracies.
Firstly, commentators often conflated decriminalising people who use drugs with permitting drug dealing. If the Joint Committee’s recommendations were adopted, selling, supplying, cultivating, manufacturing and importing drugs would remain crimes.
Contrary to what the Minister of State for the National Drugs Strategy, Jennifer Murnane O’Connor, said, it is not ‘legalisation’ when supplying drugs remains illegal.
Nor, as the Tánaiste suggested, does decriminalisation imply approval. Just because a behaviour is not a crime does not mean the State supports it. Attempting to die by suicide was a crime until the early 90s.
Legal scholars argue that decriminalisation was not endorsement, but acceptance that it is wrong for the State to punish a person in that position. We don’t criminalise smoking, but our laws and policies successfully discourage it. Decriminalisation does not stop anyone arguing that using drugs is a problem or applying policy levers to dissuade people from doing so.
Finally, in response to the report, the Taoiseach argued that Ireland has already moved to a health-led approach, and the Minister for Justice said that possession isn’t prosecuted ‘to a large extent’.
The figures contradict this: the District Court saw 3,959 convictions for drug possession offences in 2025, while there were 17,125 charges or summonses for the possession of cannabis in just over three years after cannabis possession offences became eligible for the adult caution.
Criminal justice responses to people who use drugs are alive and well. However, criminalisation mostly happens to those in poverty, although the prevalence of illegal drug use is almost identical in poorer and wealthier areas. Criminal records limit access to education and employment, while research shows that stigma discourages the people who need help the most from seeking it.
In other words, our approach is neither health-led nor morally defensible on the basis that ‘middle Ireland’ might feel less responsible for black markets created by State prohibition.
Meanwhile, when Portugal decriminalised personal use, research suggests that engagement with treatment increased. Drug-related deaths, high-risk use, use among young groups, and HIV cases from injecting all fell. As the Portuguese example shows, we can reduce acute drug-related harms by decriminalising people who use drugs and reinvesting in health and welfare.
Studies across countries also indicate that changing laws and policies can reduce harms without causing negative side effects. As a Department of Justice-commissioned review of policy change in nine countries concludes, ‘alternative measures can reduce harms imposed by criminal justice processes without increasing drug use or related health and crime harms’.
Even as billions have been spent on the ‘war on drugs’, drug cultivation and trafficking have risen. So what would be the implications of repealing section 3 for policing the drug trade?
In Ireland and around the world, police forces expend significant resources to search, arrest and prosecute people for drug possession. My recent research in Dublin West aligns with the research across Europe: young people in working class and minority ethnic communities who do not carry or use drugs are frequently stopped and searched for these policing operations. This lowers their trust in the police and their inclination to seek the police’s help when needed.
Repealing section 3 would not inhibit the policing of drug markets. Gardaí would retain their legal powers to police distribution activities and have more resources to target supply.
In Portugal, the weight of drugs seized increased after decriminalisation, as police shifted their attention towards higher levels of the market. Gardaí expressed concerns that decriminalisation makes it harder to gain intelligence, but a senior Portuguese police leader – working in a country that decriminalised drugs around 25 years ago – dismissed this suggestion when giving evidence at the Oireachtas.
Gardaí can also easily be empowered to police public use. In addition to existing public order law, local authorities can use similar bylaws to those which ban alcohol consumption in public places to enable Gardaí to confiscate drugs that are reasonably suspected of being used in public, arrest those suspected to be in breach of the by laws and/or issue fines.
Violence is another critical public concern that the State must tackle. We know from international research that the gardaí could collaborate with families and health, social and violence services to prevent and interrupt violence. However, the Joint Committee heard zero scientific evidence to suggest that criminalising people who use drugs reduces violence.
One systematic review of drug law enforcement and violence concluded: ‘increasing drug law enforcement is unlikely to reduce drug market violence [that] may be an inevitable consequence of drug prohibition and disrupting drug markets can paradoxically increase violence’. Again, drug-related violence could be reduced through a smarter, evidence-led approach.
Health experts are best placed to discuss the medicines, therapies and other health interventions and courses of treatment that help people in active addiction. But criminological evidence helps us understand how criminal laws affect human behaviour, how the Gardaí and courts operate in practice, and the distribution and consequences of criminal records and punishments.
Given the extent to which this issue tends to be misunderstood, it’s such a relief to be able to agree with the Chair’s assertion that the Committee ‘listened to the evidence [and] let it lead’ with respect to the limitations of the criminal law in this context.
The Joint Oireachtas Committee, like its predecessor in the previous Oireachtas and the Citizens’ Assembly, involved people from across the political spectrum. What we see time and again is that a careful review of the evidence only leads to one conclusion: criminalising people who use drugs causes more harm than good.
It is entirely understandable that people harbour concerns relating to big questions around public safety. But when the evidence and public support for decriminalising people who use drugs is so strong, dismissing the necessary changes out of hand is not good enough.
Dr Ian Marder is an Associate Professor in Criminology at Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology. He was invited to address the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use in 2023 and the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Drugs Use in 2026.
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