Are Ireland’s drug laws actually working?

28:38And one of the things that came up in your things that's overlooked is the chronic drug abuse on the front lines in the Ukraine war. My understanding is there's no sort of battleground counselling. How would there be? Exactly. But what you do have about 100 yards behind the front line are drug dealers. Jesus. And obviously you've got thousands. For both sides or possibly mutually? Well my understanding is there's a problem with the Russians as well. And Putin has just outlawed any form of harm reduction. So you've got all these people, I mean, with either mental and or physical scars. What's going to happen?

29:21the Russians are just sticking their fingers in their ear, whereas Ukrainians are furiously commissioning, and there's been Irish involvement in trying to put together models, because obviously you're going to have tens of thousands with PTSD, and one of the things you do is turn to drugs. I was talking to a lady in Beirut the other day, Tatyana Sleeman, from the Schoon Lebanese Addiction Centre, and it was very poignant. It took us hours to get through on WhatsApp, or we eventually got through. and I was talking to her and you could hear thuds in the background and I said what are those thuds oh they're they're bombs and um she was telling me that you know three of her colleagues got the five minute warnings you're meant to get an hour but you suddenly get your phone pings or it's on the internet here's where we're going to bomb you have five minutes to leave and you have your whole life your pet parrot your dog everything what what sort of choices do you make in five minutes i suppose you probably just run for it and she was saying that lays up yeah well absolutely i don't know if i would and i worry about the dog yeah maybe the wife um but you know 40 of the people using her services are now homeless and you realize that you know again you talk about palestine when i was in the lebanon the palestinian refugee camps in the lebanon we think they're going to be tense but of course they're not they've been there since 1948 they're de facto cities of 150 ,000 people but they're not full Lebanese citizens so they can barely work legally they can't leave they're in open prison and methamphetamine use is rife in those camps and a lot of families encourage their kids to go into the trade to make some money there is a suggestion which they have denied and i hope they won't sue us that hezbollah are major players in the methamphetamine um trades to to raise money and indeed several labs being found in areas that appear to be controlled by hezbollah um they strenuously deny that so you know again if you're being bombed back to the stone age and someone's got methamphetamine or heroin i mean there's a good chance you're going to take it and you can't really sort of, you know, have a moral judgment about that.

31:37I mean, I'd be doing the same if it was being bombed every day. I wrote down a note there when you talked about drugs and war and Ukraine and everything. I mean, drugs and war go all the way back to the beginning of wars. I mean, I remember reading about, you know, even the Nazis putting the, when they went through the Ardennes at the beginning of World War II, you know, they were all on this thing called Perviton. Yeah. And then the, even in World War I, how do they get the, how do they get the guys to go over the top? E. Absolutely. It was E, wasn't it? It was MDMA. They were on MDMA in 1914 and 15.

32:10And ketamine goes back to the year dot as well. I mean, people think that ketamine's a new thing, but it was a battleground anaesthetic, probably back to the First World War. One thing that is recurring is the huge damage done across the board by Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy and Elon Musk, you know, and his chainsaw. Like, you know. Well, they've just stripped down the CDC. Everything. They've eliminated experts. They've gotten rid of scientists, fired scientists, put in kooks. I mean, Dr. Oz himself is just a TV evangelist, basically. Trump. Yeah, and Trump blowing boats out of the water with Secretary of War.

32:46And they're not even on their way to America, those boats. Strangely, though, with Trump, he's reclassified cannabis to be less serious, which might mean we won't get people in jail for 35 years for three strikes and you're out for marijuana. There are still prisoners serving life sentences purely for personal possession of marijuana. But he's also very pro hallucinogenics. I say he's on them half the time, possibly. But he wants to see because hallucinogens can be used to treat PTSD, a whole range of things, alcoholism. I did a bit of work with the company a few years ago, and it looks really promising.

33:24So it's a very interesting area that was actually being explored in the 60s in America. I found out that Andy Williams had marriage guidance counseling on LSD. Yeah. Gary Grant was a huge LSD taker. That's it. But then Nixon came in with the war on drugs and just saying no. And anything like that was just cut. So actually, the medicinal benefits of everything from marijuana to psilocybin or whatever, you know it was arrested for 30 or 40 years because scientists couldn't um you know do do the number crunching and the research but now we're going to see i think some major advances medically and we tease that out in the show that's a subject we've come to robert kennedy was a heroin addict for 14 years as he admits himself um and i've asked people can they unpick kennedy and nobody can i mean he is just the most incredible enigma more so in a way i think than Trump.

34:21I think I can work Trump out. But Kennedy is just weird. Another thing which I find fascinating, we spoke to Noel Brown, who is the now retired the Guardi's liaison officer in Columbia for seven years. And he was instrumental in that seizure of 160 million euros worth of cocaine as it neared the Irish coast. And he was telling me about the technology. And I shouldn't get excited by this, but narco submarines. They build their own submarines that can travel halfway around the world. These cartels have more money in the coffers than most African countries. And the way they've got their own satellites, I mean, all sorts of incredible stuff.

35:07Kinahan Cartel is a multi-billion dollar company. Absolutely. And there are narco states in Africa, only one or two, where the economy is so interlinked with drug smuggling that if you were to stop the smuggling of the country, it would absolutely collapse. It's so embedded in the economic sort of model. So we have such a broad range of people. I always find it interesting to talk to former top cops who just wanted to lock people up and arrest these degenerates. A guy like Jason Q, who worked for Thames Valley Police, was very high up. And again, he just went, why am I arresting these people of something that's not harmful to anybody apart from them.

35:48And there's nothing like a born-again law enforcement person. Because I think, you know, people listen to me and go, oh, he's a rock journalist, works for Hot Press, you know, great, whatever. But a policeman saying, you know what, this doesn't work. And Jason has turned now into a campaigner for decriminalization, harm reduction, and has just succeeded in getting state funding in the UK for safe inhalation pipes for crack users. And this is going to save lives. so I'm hoping that you know in Ireland now we can make this an electoral issue we're going to be doing everything we can over the next year or two to see if we can bring it out more and more into the mainstream but it's an uphill task it strikes me that um even just visually um on the streets of Dublin it's it's as let's say as as obvious as it's ever been isn't it yeah um it's awful but I I used to get shocked by seeing somebody injecting between their toes.

36:44I'm not immune to it. And I go, oh, but it's not shocking in the same way. So I see it all the time. The crack pipe use. Again, at first you go, my God, someone's smoking crack. But now I remember a few years ago, my co-host is a wonderful guy called Tony Duffin. Was the CEO of the Analiffy Drug Project in Dublin for a number of years. and brought about one of the major innovations. And we find this difficult with the show, and I'll explain why in a second. I think the best practice these days within an organization, and Analyfia doing this, is to have at every level people with lived and living experience.

37:22Now, obviously, if it's living experience, you have to work out parameters and employment contracts, that kind of a thing. Lived experience, a little easy to deal with. But if you're talking to people with living experience, you want to hear the realities of what's going on. and if you talk to people who use drugs you realize that somebody's brother or uncle or auntie that they have a story they're nice people the majority of them you know and they want to be heard um but obviously as a media person you don't want to take advantage of somebody and you know can they give their consent to being identified so there's a whole ethical issue there we would like more people on the podcast with living experience and i think in terms of the debate that's how we can move things on here um but it does come with sort of dangers ireland is overrun by um cocaine at the moment yes um i mean there was a lot of talk about that in the celtic tiger years about it's i think it's even worse now because the because of the price of of everything the cost of living in Ireland, the cost that it takes to go out and get drunk, to buy drink, that people now are just getting loaded up on cocaine before they go out.

38:35Every publican I know says their bar take has gone down and down and down. Yeah, and that's not just because people are giving up alcohol. It's because they're transferred to cocaine. Absolutely. That is happening a lot. But cocaine is one of the most fucking disgusting drugs in terms of the way it makes people, the kind of community it creates when people are on cocaine and also the long term psychological effects are awful. This is where being honest about drugs is a good idea because people go oh you know you take a line of coke you're going to die. No you probably won't do but I didn't know until recently the synthesis that happens when you drink and take cocaine and that does not, like if you take heroin and you stop taking it you can probably recover and live a full and normal life until you're 80.

39:25But cocaine and alcohol, I'm not a doctor. It secretes a certain substance. And this proverbial ticking time bomb is actually real. So once you've done that damage, you're sitting there going, right, I'm doing me marathon. I'm going to the gym four times a week, but I still have a heart attack. So I think, you know, that's why being honest about drugs, you know, to be able to say, if you're going out taking cocaine, ease up on the alcohol. Can you see a situation, can it be, not scientifically, but from your looking at it, if I said Ireland is overrun by cocaine, if you decriminalise, do you think that we can lessen that scourge in relation to cocaine?

40:04Let's take cocaine. Well, you can lessen the harms. I mean, you know, if you're educating people, but also you're giving people these safer inhalation pipes, you know, things like that. You know, if someone's taking drugs, how do you stop them? It's very, very hard. You know, this thing about, oh, well, you know, if you take cocaine, you're buying bullets for rebels in Colombia or terrorists. I'm sorry that might be valid, but there's such a disconnect. People aren't going to stop. but i just think that if somebody is caught with drugs what benefit to society is giving them a criminal record and to go back to leo vradka if leo had been unlucky enough during the student days to be busted he would never have been a doctor he might have become t-shock possibly i doubt it but he wouldn't be allowed to go to america to meet the president on paddy's day he couldn't have gone to japan to meet the japanese prime minister but he got away with it and that's why I was going back to the original point that if you do as a politician say I try drugs yup whatever and then you're not supporting decriminalisation I think there's actually a gross hypocrisy there I think.

41:18Damien is involved Damien Dempsey? Damien Dempsey is a wonderful man on so many levels one of the best gigs I've been to in the last three years was the Christmas get together. Bicker Street? No, Cool Mind Therapeutic Community. Damien is an ambassador for people who go into this residential community, a range of addiction issues. And he goes in there, he chats to everybody. And they had a Christmas gig. And there's a couple of lads playing away who were amazing. One of them did Soft Cell, an acoustic version of Say Hello, Wave Goodbye. What a song. And after I said to Damien, I said, Oh, it's your mate you brought with you.

41:57Oh, no, no, he's a resident here. I said, Oh, my God. music is incredibly powerful as we know we did an interview with him and he was very very honest he spoke about a cousin who passed away in the bath after an overdose and the damaged cocaine in particular was done to communities like Don Amead where he's from one of his songs is the Dirty Devil's Dandruff which addresses that he also spoke very fondly of Christy Dignam who of course had addiction issues down through the years it's a beautiful interview And as I say, it's so human. And again, I think it's important because, you know, just hearing these stories, they're very human stories.

42:38We want to get on some bereaved parents fairly shortly. Again, we don't want to be exploitative. But I think what they have to say, many of them have come round to the fact that, you know, prohibition doesn't work. You think that they might be really uber cracking down and imprisoning everybody. But often bereaved parents realize that, well, my kid wasn't a bad lot. They weren't a criminal. They just dabbled in something. And maybe there have been better outcomes if they had to be an ostracized. There was stigma. I mean, so that's very powerful. You sit down with a parent who's worked out themselves.

43:13Actually, you know what we're doing now doesn't work. It makes things worse. Damien's great. Just you brought back a really fond memory into my head of myself. Tony Fenton and Ian Dempsey coming out of O'Donoghue's at about 9 o 'clock in the evening walking down Stephen's Green screaming at the top of our lungs I'm busting out of here by Stephen by Damien I'm busting out of here absolutely fantastic and the apple of my eye then New York oh god I love it no he's just the real deal as you're talking the music industry the current episode of Dealing with Drugs the Hot Press podcast is with a guy called the secret drug addict.

43:51Now, he spoke to us, you know, so we know he's male. And he worked at the height of Britpop for Creation Records. And he would have worked indirectly for Oasis. And he has a new book, The Diary of a Secret Drug Addict. And he set up a Twitter account about eight or nine years ago to offer non-judgmental support to people with addiction issues. And it's fascinating. And I'll be honest, there's something voyeuristic about hearing about the excess of Creation Records. This is right up your street, Stuart. This is combining all the things you love in life so much. But he made the point that they were taking cocaine, an expensive drug.

44:27They weren't injecting it. They thought people taking heroin were kind of dirty and seedy and horrible. But he said like two years later, the industry changed and heroin became the drug of choice because people wanted to break that taboo. And he had so much fun on drugs until it stopped being fun. and he got fired from Creation Records, which is pretty hard to do. You know, turning up late, not a problem. Missing for a week, not a problem. But he said he went to the Creation Records Christmas party and didn't get out of the toilet. He was like that. It doesn't leave the toilet. He couldn't leave the toilet.

45:01He was either being given a line or he was giving somebody a line. It's like I was at a party recently. We were brought out for treats recently. We were brought out for a treat lunch and it was one of those things where, you know, oh, go on, you're the stars. You can have whatever you want. So we were at the one where we were having drinks waiting for our drinks. We were brought drinks waiting for our drinks. Do you know that kind of thing? That's the same kind of a thing. When it really stopped being fun was when he was chopping a line and a girl died at his feet. Now, I hadn't got the drugs from him, but he was kind of like, this isn't what it was supposed to be.

45:33I was supposed to be a record mogul. I was meant to be the Richard Branson of my generation, and now there's people dying around me. He's now nearly 7 ,000 days sober. And fascinatingly, he's best mates with Neville Southall. 7 ,000 days sober. That's 20 years. Yeah. Yeah. Neville Southall, yeah. No, no, not Neville Southall. The secret drug addict. No, Neville Southall. Go on. Yeah. Neville Southall's never taken illegal drugs. Can we just clarify that? But he's a working class lad from the Welsh Valleys. Yeah. You'd think he might be quite socially conservative, but he's not. He has a Twitter account with a quarter of a million people, and he has people with drug addiction issues, sex workers, and the secret drug addict helps curate that.

46:24So Neville hopefully is coming on the show in a few episodes. Another person who is very actively involved in the whole addiction thing and would be a pal of the secret drug addict is Tony Adams, who has a new book. We're hoping to get him on the show. Yeah. Talking about 1996, both on and off the pitch. So Arsenal won the double. Absolutely. While he was, you know, going out, getting pissed every night. And blacking out. And blacking out, but still was able to be an elite sportsman. So I'm looking forward to reading that book. So we're just looking for those really interesting stories. I don't want it to be, look, I'm a middle-aged man.

47:04I'm not middle-aged, I'm over 60. We don't want to be sort of like experts talking to experts and to be an echo chamber. We don't want to trivialise things either. But, you know, there's been a few good laughs and a few real kind of interesting moments. You tell your mates down the park, I heard this thing about narco submarines. They go halfway around the world. It sounds to me like the kamikaze dolphins that Pete Hegshead was talking about the other day. We're in the land of Alice in Wonderland at this stage. We're in the land of Upside Down. And with those drug cartels, you know, it's trillions of dollars so it is like James Bond, the gadgets they have all the kind of the gizmos One of the things you love Stuart of course is when you were on my podcast towards the beginning of the podcast a few years ago, you were talking about rock and roll stories and you had all these sort of stories tell me in reflection now looking over the years, what has stayed in your head as a really good rock and roll story and the second question is are rock and rollers just not half as fun as they used to be?

48:04I think that Harry Styles is a great laugh, is he? I mean, Noel Gallagher Clang said to me that they got away with so much because the early part of their career was before mobile phones. I think one of the best stories I was told, and I often use this when I say to bands, can you outgross this? There was a band called the Wild Hearts who still exist. And they used to get bored on the road. and they would, you know, get up to various things. And their bus driver had chronic athlete's foot. So they got him to get a razor blade, chop it into a line. And one of the guys, when he forfeited, had to snort up a line.

48:49And then there was another band. I don't know if I identified them, so I won't say it now. Don't get you sued. They were going through Belgium, getting bored. I think it goes with Han and Howard being in Belgium. Actually, I joke. Belgium is a great country. Belgium more to you. So they were on acid, and they went into a service station. Do you remember those, like, furry caterpillars on twine? Yeah, yeah. So they got those and superglue and gave themselves, you know, moustaches and sideburns and goatees. So they arrive in their destination the next morning, having come down off the acid have to meet the record company going to the boardroom wearing all this kind of fluorescent caterpillars on their faces i think that's quite funny yeah yeah um but i mean with lemmy you know yeah i did ask him did you have to get sort of a blood transfusion he said no but if i was to get one if i i required one that have to take into account that my blood is some sort of kind of chemical pace now.

49:53It has mutated. And, you know, I said to him, I said, you know, you're a role model. I said, no, I'm not. He said, I'm not a role model. He said, I'd never tell anybody to take drugs. He said, but I'm just honest about them. And he was telling me a story about when he was roadying for Jimi Hendrix and driving the bus off his bin on LSD, you know, halfway across the country. Which, again, because they didn't go off the road and kill anybody is quite a funny story now, but at the time, possibly not the best thing to do. But he was saying that, you know, just be honest and kids don't take heroin.

50:25Because, as I say, no one has fun heroin stories that I've met. I'm just thinking now, Bill Clinton said he didn't inhale. That's what he claimed. And Robert Kennedy says, I was 14 years taking heroin. I know, I know. How times have changed. The Overton window has shifted. I think it was probably Obama, or was it Clinton? I think it was Obama, who said the biggest mistake in American policy over the last 50 years was the war on drugs. It was singularly. And we had a very interesting chat the other day to a lady whose name escapes me now. It's a foreign lady's name, Polish name, and it's just gone.

51:04But she was saying that America goes on about all the cocaine and fentanyl going from Mexico over the border. and they've been blowing up narco boats, which aren't narco boats. But all the guns being used by the Mexican cartels are coming the other way across the border. Often, the cocaine going to the States is being paid for with ammunition from America. So, you know, Trump goes about all these people being killed on the streets of America. Well, what about people being killed on the streets of Mexico? So it's an interesting two-way trade. There's so much to unpick. And hopefully we're unpicking stuff that will make people think and maybe more inclined to go, well, what do the politicians say?

51:52One of the problems we have in this country, in Ireland, is serving police officers in the UK can and do say, this isn't working. I'm going to stop arresting people for using cannabis. It's a waste of my time, their time, everybody's time. Here, the Gardaí, when they're serving, they're not allowed to comment on operations. They merely implement the policy. I've had private conversations with a lot of very senior acting Gardaí who go, you're absolutely right. This is nonsense. But they can't say it. In the UK, it hasn't actually helped because Keir Starmer is another just say no merchant. He's intransigent.

52:32But the debate has probably advanced a little bit more in the UK and certainly abroad. broad because you're saying it for for the actual police on the street to have an input yeah into the raison d 'etre of what they're doing and i'm sure privately they talk to politicians and civil servants but i think if we're to have an informed debate they should be allowed to to comment i personally um just one final thing actually um we're talking about jason q the former um thames valley top cop he's done a fascinating piece of research um i won't bog you down with too much medical stuff but there is a uh an opioid substitute called budaval which in the uk you get a monthly injection if you're taking heroin and for that month you feel fine you're able to function so you can get back into employment you can look after the family all of this kind of a thing and you're not absolutely going crazy every day for a fix here people tend to be on daily methadone maintenance to go to a pharmacy.

53:34Sometimes haphazard lifestyles, you're in full-blown addiction, you don't go. That is feeding in to the shoplifting epidemic in major cities. The Gardaí say that 33 % of shoplifting incidents are linked to addiction. By introducing Budeval into the supply chain, and we're very slow to do that, there are various reasons funding being one of them is a bit more expensive in other cities like Dublin this has reduced retail crime by almost 75 percent okay so Budavel costs not tons more than methadone but how short-sighted are we being because if you get people back into the workforce not robbing not going in and out of jail through a revolving door then over a period of couple of years the state is going to save a fortune but we're so slow and then we have a citizens assembly when they recommended another stuff we went okay grand that's brilliant because it's what the government's wanted to hear here's like oh they want this well we'll kind of do that and we fudge and you know what we'll have a new drugs minister and he'll come in or she'll come in and say exactly the same things we did have a drugs minister what i hate about now i'm cynical about politics i think everybody is but you see career politicians getting a portfolio like the drugs one because a certain party needs a minister from a certain part of the country and they come in with no appetite or understanding for the job and i've sat down with some and it is shocking that they just know nothing about it or civil servants by them yet it's not like anna riadon who wanted the brief understood the brief moved things forward more in his short tenure than any other minister in God knows how many years and laid the foundations for the medically supervised injecting room that is doubtless saving lives.

55:32So, you know, can we get politicians, please, that are fit for purpose? Are at least interested in the job. And are not wanting to be a safe pair of hands, i.e. do nothing. See, the problem is it's not a vote winner. I don't know how you make it. That is what organisations somehow have to think. Can we find some way of doing a drug version of... Surely it is a vote winner if you link it to for example the idea of do you want to see O 'Connell Street and great streets like that brought back to former glories? That might be the way you have to do it rather than saying rather than saying what about these poor people with addiction issues?

56:10Yeah, would you like to have your streets minus syringes? You know, it was funny because tony when he was with anna liffey took me on a drug safari and i used to see jiff lemons at the top of laneways and i thought people popping down there for an emergency pancake but no they're using it as a cutting agent with their heroin yeah and once you know where to look he took me up to doyle aaron and there's one building with a load of leaves and underneath the leaves the heroin needles have been left behind by people addiction issues to use the next time and virtually any windowsill has a syringe and when you start knowing what to look for bits of silver foil but the Jif lemons now I can't go more than 50 yards without thinking of Jif lemon so you know drugs are everywhere let's not kid ourselves we're going to get rid of them Stuart thank you very much for coming in and talking to me about this the podcast is called Dealing in Drugs?

57:02Dealing with Drugs? Dealing with Drugs? I'm not dealing in drugs that would be an entirely different matter Dealing with Drugs A Hot Press Podcast A hot press podcast. And it's such an interesting subject. And you're about five episodes into it at the moment. Yeah, and we're getting amazing response. We're going to have the former Colombian Minister for Drugs on in a couple of weeks. Worth a listen. I can't wait. That's going to be an interesting one. Thanks, Stuart. Cheers.

57:31And my thanks to Stuart Clarke for coming in and talking to me about drugs and politicians. And my thanks, of course, to Hum Finance for partnering up with the Mario Rosenstock podcast. Hum is a finance company who provide flexible payment solutions for customers, some of Ireland's most popular retailers. Thank you, Hum. And of course, thank you to you, the most important element of this podcast, the listener. The podcast is free. We don't charge a fee. There is no premium. There is no subscriber-led subscriber special podcast put out. This comes to you for free. So all I ask in return, if you tell one other person that you enjoyed this podcast, let them know and follow us on the socials.

58:12It really, really does help. Thanks and see you same time, same place next week.