Responsibility for monitoring health in the State's prisons should be removed from the Department of Justice and taken over by the Department of Health, a Dail committee was told last night.
Dr Joe Barry, medical adviser to the National Drugs Strategy Team, said about half of the prison population was addicted to drugs and about 80 per cent of those addicts were testing positive for hepatitis C.
"Change in prison healthcare is urgently needed and there is a great argument for giving responsibility to the Department of Health and Children rather than the Department of Justice. I think we are storing up big problems the way we are dealing with this."
Dr Barry was speaking during a hearing by the Joint Committee on European Affairs into a draft report titled "Social Consequences of, and Responses to, Drug Misuse in Member-States".
The author of the report, Dr Paul Flynn, of the Social, Health and Family Affairs Committee, told the Dail committee his research indicated that countries with strict prohibition policies towards drugs had encountered greater problems than those countries with liberal regimes.
He said that the UK had some of the highest cannabis use, and greatest increases in addiction and drug deaths, while pursuing "prohibition" policies with the strictest penalties in Europe. By contrast, the Netherlands, which had 25 years of regulating demand, had "spectacularly impressive results" in controlling the safe use of drugs.
There were 40 deaths from heroin per million of population in the UK compared with less than four per million of population in the Netherlands.
Mr Tony Geoghegan, of the Merchants Quay Project in Dublin, told the committee that there were an estimated 13,000 heroin addicts in Dublin, but only 5,000 were engaged in treatment. The Republic's drug addicts have the lowest age profile in the EU with an average age of 24. On average, young heroin users in Dublin do not seek treatment until they have been addicted for 2 1/2 years.
Mr Geoghegan said there were 86 drug-related deaths in Dublin last year, 16 more than in 1998.
He challenged the notion that cannabis was a "gateway" to harder drugs. In his experience, social deprivation was the main gateway to drug addiction.