Threats, broken windows and the drugs decriminalisation debate

The ordeal for Angela lasted six months. One day she answered a knock on her door. A man was outside telling her to pay a drug debt owed by her son.

'I don't owe nothing to nobody," Angela says she told him.

I have never taken drugs, I have never bought drugs, I have never sold drugs, I never had anything to do with drugs, never. I said, 'under no circumstances, I am not paying you.'

"They said, 'Oh, you’ll pay. Your son owes it to me, but because your son isn’t here, you are going to have to pay it - no choice.’"

There were "all kinds of threats," Angela (not her real name) told Prime Time. "'We’ll burn you out, we’ll catch you when you are out on the street.'"

Those verbal threats were backed up with violence. Angela's home – in an urban area outside Dublin - and her car were targeted with baseball bats and rocks. Prime Time visited her around the time the attacks were happening and witnessed some of the damage, including a freshly smashed front window.

"You don’t sleep, you don’t feel safe enough to sleep. All I do know, is that at one stage, the doctor was giving me more tablets than I would take any time. The anxiety was crippling, not knowing what was going to come to my door next. Every day felt like a year."

"Six months, six months of fear, six months of not knowing whether you’d be beaten half to death in your bed. The not knowing is the worst part, it’s the not knowing who is at your door."

In Angela’s case, the attacks finally stopped after intervention from gardaí.

"My only advice is to talk to the police, because they can’t help you unless you talk… I know it’s frightening and I know you probably will still have trouble, but they will do everything for you that they have to do."

The activities of drugs gangs like the one that intimidated Angela are rarely out of the news, but the problem they feed off - drug taking - and how to deal with it has come into sharper focus in recent weeks with the proposal by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Drugs Use to decriminalise the possession of drugs for personal use.

The committee proposes a health-centred approach to drug users rather than a law-and-order one.

"Decriminalisation is very different from legalisation. The decriminalisation proposal would remove criminal penalties on personal use only", notes Dr Cian Ó Concubhair, Department of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University

But some, including Angela, fear that it might normalise drugs like cocaine pushed by drugs gangs.

"The only winners if the proposal were to become a reality will be the drug pushers," said Tony Gallagher, a former Garda Inspector in Dublin Central.

"It'll be perceived as becoming tolerable by society. And that is the experience in Lisbon, that is the experience in Belgium. That is the experience in Germany."

It is commonly perceived that gardai are already turning a blind eye to drug use as opposed to drug dealing.

Figures recently supplied to Fianna Fáil MEP Cynthia Ní Mhurchú show that there were 3,959 District Court convictions for drugs possession in 2025.

"Gardai are still prosecuting people," said Dr Ó Concubhair. "That's 4,000 convictions, many more were prosecuted."

Former Garda Inspector Gallagher says in his experience few people were prosecution solely for simple possession.

"For every direction that we get back from the DPP’s office for the Sale and Supply of Drugs - Section 15, there's also a subcategory of Section 3, which is the simple possession. So, it's a coupled offense."

"And certainly all the files that crossed over my desk in 20 years as an inspector, there weren't many solely on the simple possession."

Beyond inner-city Dublin, there are different approaches. Courts Service figures for District Courts nationwide supplied to Ms Ní Mhurchú show that for every conviction for selling or supplying drugs, there were over three and a half convictions for simple drugs possession.

Some advocates for decriminalisation say such convictions for possession drive people into the justice system. Including people like Ruthanne Barry, now a social entrepreneur, who was once addicted to heroin.

Prime time talked to her on Dublin’s boardwalk.

"I used to come to this boardwalk many years ago after I’d get my methadone in the clinic... it was a space where you would buy and often sell drugs," she said.

Asked whether the decriminalisation of drugs for personal use would have made a difference to her life when she was addicted, she replied, "It would have made a massive difference. When you get a charge sheet, you think, ‘I have one; it doesn’t really matter if I get another one’.That is the mindset you have when you are in that chaotic lifestyle."

Addiction is a health issue, said Ms Barry. "We need to treat it as a health issue and not as a criminal issue."

That is in line with the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Drugs Use report, which advocates that gardaí be more actively involved in referring those with drugs problems towards agencies that can help them recover.

Besides, said Ms Barry "our prisons are bursting at the seams, they are overcrowded."

Keeping people out of prison "is also cost-effective," she added.

When it comes to drugs gangs like the one that terrorised Angela, what effect could decriminalisation have?

"The evidence from countries that have decriminalised, for example, Portugal, which decriminalised 25 years ago, is that it didn't have any noticeable impact" on the activities of gangs, said Dr Ó Concubhair.

Portuguese police "didn't find it harder" to police organised crime, he said.

"Actually, decriminalisation encouraged them to be better at doing… investigative work. They weren't relying on low-level street seizures to justify their policing operations. They had to do more serious investigations."

Paul Murphy and producer Brídóg Bhuachalla full report on drugs decriminalisation featured on the 9 July edition of Prime Time at 9.35pm on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player.