The Joint Committee on Drugs Use in June 2026 called for Section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act to be repealed – which it said would decriminalise simple possession of drugs for personal use.
On Brandon del Pozo’s first day as police chief in Burlington, Vermont, the city’s mayor made a surprise announcement, he said.
Del Pozo was going to lead a public-health response, as opposed to a police response, to the city's opioid crisis.
This was total news to him at the time, he told a webinar on Tuesday, co-hosted by the Union for Improved Services, Communication and Education (UISCE) and the Irish Coalition for Drug Reform.
He had arrived after 19 years with the New York Police Department expecting to perform a more traditional policing role.
Instead, the announcement, made publicly as he was being sworn in, changed the direction of his career.
Burlington, a city of around 50,000 people, did not have its own public-health department.
That left the new police chief with a central role in developing a novel response to rising opioid death.
So, del Pozo said, the city attempted to follow the science and the experiences of people who used drugs, rather than relying solely on criminal law.
“What we did was pay attention to the evidence,” he said.
Tuesday’s event, Understanding Decriminalisation, brought together lived experience, academic research and perspectives on policing. It formed part of UISCE’s From the Ground Up: Peer Leadership, Solidarity and Social Change series.
The Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use recommended a comprehensive health-led response to personal possession in 2023. The Joint Committee on Drugs Use went further in June 2026 and called for Section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act to be repealed – which would decriminalise simple possession of drugs for personal use.
The government declined to pursue full decriminalisation, and instead introduced a Health Referral Scheme in September, under which Gardaí can divert eligible first-time offenders to the HSE rather than prosecute them. Possession remains a criminal offence.
Speakers on Tuesday argued that this limited referral scheme does not do what is needed and could leave some of the most marginalised drug users behind.
Del Pozo, who served as chief between 2015 and 2019, said the city sought to turn every encounter between a public agency and a person who used drugs into an opportunity to provide treatment or support.
A central element was easier access to buprenorphine, a medication used to treat opioid dependency, said del Pozo, who resigned as Burlington police chief in December 2019 after admitting that he had created an anonymous Twitter account to mock a police critic.
He described it as a serious lapse of judgement linked to stress and the effects of a previous brain injury. Amid the criticism, Burlington’s mayor continued to defend his wider record. He then went on to become an assistant professor of medicine, and of health services, policy and practice, at Brown University.
Buprenorphine is another option along with methadone, but can be longer-lasting as a slow-release injectable (like buvidal) or absorbed under the tongue in a daily self-administered dose (like suboxone) so a patient does not have to present themselves physically daily for doses, as they would with methadone.
Buvidal leaves the person in a very steady and comfortable state for up to a month. This can be very beneficial for people leaving prison, said Dublin GP Dr Deirdre Dowdall, in January of this year.
It’s also very difficult to overdose on, Dowdall said. Experts have been calling for the widening of its use in Ireland.
Rather than restricting buprenorphine to conventional treatment programmes, Burlington made it available through syringe services and emergency healthcare.
At a syringe programme, people who came in for sterile equipment or any of “the works” could also receive a prescription for buprenorphine without facing extensive conditions. “No questions asked.”
Several hundred people entered treatment through that route, del Pozo said.
Around that time, Vermont also passed legislation requiring jails and prisons to screen people for addiction and offer buprenorphine or methadone when clinically appropriate.
Burlington also "made it so that anyone could walk in at any time into the emergency department and get a prescription for buprenorphine", he said.
Importantly, he said, Burlington also stopped arresting people for possessing buprenorphine without a prescription.
“If you wanted it, get it anywhere you can get it, take it on your own terms, how it works with you, and we’re not coming after you for it,” he said.
Chittenden County, which includes Burlington, recorded a 50 per cent fall in opioid-overdose deaths in 2018, a reduction that was sustained into 2019, while deaths rose elsewhere in Vermont.
Del Pozo cautioned that no scientific study had established a direct causal relationship between Burlington’s interventions and the decline.
However, he believed there was a strong association between falling deaths and the city’s “open arms” approach, which combined low-threshold treatment with reduced criminalisation.
As police chief, del Pozo worked with researchers from Johns Hopkins University to develop the Ten Standards of Care: Policing and the Opioid Crisis.
The standards called on police departments to educate staff about addiction, stigma, and how to administer naloxone - an emergency medication, administered by nasal spray or injection, which can rapidly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. As well as supporting syringe programmes and advocating for “on demand” treatment access.
They also recommended diverting people towards treatment rather than prison and ensuring that medication was available in jails, prisons and under community supervision.
The document urges police to examine the evidence for supervised consumption facilities.
Del Pozo said that recommendation immediately alienated some police audiences, even when officers had accepted the preceding proposals.
The experience demonstrated the difficulty of introducing reforms that some officers initially regarded as permitting unlawful activity, he said.
It also reinforced the need to involve police in developing new approaches and to address their concerns about public safety and enforcement.
Del Pozo’s subsequent academic research examined how drug seizures affected overdose risk.
He said it supported what people who used drugs had already told researchers – that interrupting an established supply could make consumption more dangerous.
When drugs were seized or a dealer was arrested, dependent users might enter withdrawal, seek a different supplier or encounter substances of an unfamiliar potency.
They might also take greater risks to secure replacement drugs.
“If your job as a police officer is to save lives, this isn’t the way to do it,” he said.
Police officers interviewed as part of the research understood the same risks, del Pozo said. They knew that closing down one supply could push people towards an uncertain alternative.
However, officers were also responding to complaints from communities about dealing, violence, sex work and public disorder.
That tension meant decriminalisation had to offer a credible answer to concerns about the use of streets, parks, bus stops and other public spaces.
Speaking at Tuesday’s event was an artist and writer, Jinx, whose contribution placed lived experience alongside del Pozo’s research.
In her own autobiographical, bleak comic book-style presentation, A Vixen’s Eye View, she described a life shaped by homelessness, addiction, sex work, mental illness and repeated encounters with gardaí and the justice system.
She portrayed the confiscation of drugs not as an intervention that made her safer, but as something that forced her further into desperation.
"Congrats, officer, you saved me from myself,” she joked as she recalled such an encounter.
Jinx recounted how she once overdosed after gardaí arrested her regular dealer, whom she knew and trusted, right in front of her.
Unable to obtain drugs from her usual source, she bought from a new dealer and didn’t know the strength or contents of what she was taking.
Jinx’s lived-account backed del Pozo’s argument that enforcement could unintentionally produce the very harm it was intended to prevent.
“The law tells them we’re dangerous, so they’re afraid,” Jinx narrated, as she presented her artwork. “They don’t see me, the child that I was. They see a criminal.”
The experiences of Oregon and Portugal demonstrated two different approaches to decriminalisation, del Pozo said – and two different outcomes.
Oregon, which of the 50 US states was one of the worst for access to treatment, he said, decriminalised possession of small amounts of drugs in 2021, promising to use cannabis-tax revenue to expand treatment.
But the state, with already poor access to services, took almost two years to begin distributing much of the funding, he said.
People found with drugs were issued tickets directing them towards a health screening, but few called the number and very few entered treatment. The policy had not been adequately coordinated with police, del Pozo said.
At the same time, fentanyl entered Oregon’s drug market and overdose deaths increased sharply.
Decriminalisation was blamed, but research by del Pozo and his colleagues found that fentanyl accounted for the increase when its arrival was incorporated into their statistical model.
“Fentanyl hit Oregon's drug market in the exact same quarter, first quarter of 2021, as decriminalization,” he said.
“And when you model that and look at fentanyl's effects and the havoc it wreaks on people who use drugs, and control for it, that accounted for really all of the increase in overdose that the popular press attributed to decriminalisation,” he said. “That was the final nail in the coffin.”
The evidence emerged too late to alter the political narrative, he said, and Oregon subsequently re-criminalised possession.
“It took a year and a half for the study to come out, it was too late to change the tide,” he said. “We briefed folks in Oregon, they didn't care.”
“So, I will say as a cautionary tale, any decriminalization has to be very, very carefully implemented,” he said.
Portugal approached reform differently, he said.
Police were given a year to develop training before decriminalisation took effect.
Officers could still confiscate drugs and respond to public disorder, but a person could not be prosecuted or imprisoned merely for possession.
Instead, people could be referred to a commission, have their needs assessed and receive free treatment without being criminally punished if they did not engage.
After 25 years, Portuguese police have broadly accepted the system “as a way of life”, del Pozo said. They continue to investigate serious trafficking and believe they retained sufficient powers to maintain public order.
The reform also reduced confrontation between families and police, del Pozo noted.
A mother could tell officers that her son was using drugs and needed help without fearing that the information would lead to him receiving a criminal conviction, he said.
Other contributors on Tuesday said that Ireland’s current policies fall far short of the comprehensive health-led response recommended by the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use and the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drugs Use.
Margaret Hester, UISCE’s programme and policy manager, stressed that decriminalisation was not the same as legalisation. It would remove criminal penalties for possessing drugs for personal use without legalising their sale or supply.
Hester noted that an upcoming position paper from UISCE questions whether Ireland’s new health-referral scheme could leave some of the most marginalised people behind.
Under the current guidelines, a recent conviction or more than one previous conviction could mean someone is deemed "unsuitable" for referral, she said.
Hester said this was particularly concerning because people who used drugs were already disproportionately exposed to arrest, imprisonment and repeat contact with the criminal justice system.
The scheme could therefore exclude those most affected by criminalisation, she said, reinforcing the inequalities a health-led approach was intended to address.
Ian Marder, an associate professor of criminology at Maynooth University, countered suggestions that Ireland had already moved away from prosecuting people for personal possession.
Marder challenged a recent statement by Taoiseach Micheál Martin that Ireland had moved towards a health-led response to drug addiction over the previous 20 years, and that its approach had not been criminal “in the main”.
Available figures do not support that description, Marder said.
Data obtained through Freedom of Information requests showed that more than 20,000 possession convictions were recorded between 2020 and 2025. During that period, 711 people received immediate or suspended prison sentences for summary drug offences, he said.
"That's not a trend that is going down," he said. In 2025, there were almost 4,000 possession convictions, while 105 people were imprisoned for summary drug offences.
Marder said it was sometimes argued that possession charges arose mainly in cases where a person had also been accused of dealing.
However, separate figures showed that more than 8,000 people were charged or summonsed in 2025 for possession without being accused of dealing or any other offence.
“Thousands and thousands of people” were therefore being prosecuted for possession alone, he said.
He also rejected claims that cannabis possession had been effectively decriminalised through the adult caution system.
More than 12,000 arrests for cannabis possession had been recorded over the last two-and-a-half-year period, he said, with only around one quarter resulting in a caution.
“Or in other words, a very significant proportion, huge numbers of people are arrested, of whom a very significant proportion are charged,” he said. “So, it's not even that the caution is being universally used.”
Marder said the state’s new health-referral scheme did not amount to the approach recommended by the Citizens’ Assembly.
Under the scheme, gardaí retained discretion over whether a person found with a small quantity of drugs should receive a health referral.
“This is not health-led. This is police-led,” he said. “We do not have, and there is no acceptance of, a comprehensive health-led approach in Ireland.”
The repeated use of words such as “agrees” and “accepts” in the government’s response could create the impression that the state had accepted the recommendations in full, he said.
In practice, a once-off referral at garda discretion was fundamentally different from removing criminal penalties for personal possession.
Marder said genuine decriminalisation would require the repeal of Section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act. That would prevent gardaí and the courts from arresting, charging, convicting or imprisoning someone solely for possessing drugs for personal use.
“That is what decriminalisation would actually require,” he said. “That is what the comprehensive health-led approach would require.”
He stressed that decriminalising personal possession would not amount to legalisation or prevent the state from addressing public-safety problems, which “are important to people”.
Public drug use could be regulated through local-authority by-laws, similar to how alcohol is currently treated, he said, while gardaí would retain their existing public-order powers.
Marder said decriminalisation would also have to be accompanied by harm-reduction measures, including supervised consumption facilities.
There is currently one Medically Supervised Injecting Facility in Ireland, run by Merchants Quay Ireland (MQI) in Dublin 8.
Recommendation 27 of the Oireachtas Committee on Drugs Use final report calls for a change to the Misuse of Drugs (Supervised Injecting Facilities) Act 2017, so that supervised injecting facilities could cater for broader forms of drug consumption, like smoking crack cocaine, as well as allowing mobile consumption facilities and sites. "Primarily as a harm-reduction measure for people who use drugs, but also to reduce the prevalence of street use."
Regardless of any legislative reform, gardaí already have discretion over how they use their resources, he said.
He pointed to former Durham chief constable Mike Barton, who publicly decided that pursuing people for cannabis possession was a waste of limited police resources and caused more harm than good.
Barton’s force also used diversion more widely where offending was driven by a health problem, Marder said. That could include people accused of selling heroin who were themselves experiencing active addiction.
“If what is going to help you and help society is for you to receive healthcare and access to health services, that is what we are going to do,” Marder said of Barton's Durham approach.
He ended by placing drug criminalisation within Ireland’s wider history of institutionalisation and stigma.
Imprisoning people experiencing addiction constituted an institutional harm, he argued, and reform should involve not only ending that harm but acknowledging and repairing it.
“For me, what hope means is, first of all, stop causing unnecessary harm,” he said. “You should not be causing people harm for no good reason when the research evidence is super clear about this.”
He imagined a future in which the state apologised to people harmed through the criminalisation and institutionalisation of addiction, drawing on the language used in previous official apologies for institutional abuse.
“This is the hopeful future, I think, inevitably, we will move towards,” he said, “where not only does the harm stop, but the harm is recognised, and there are moves to repair that harm.”
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