Dr. Barry Cullen:

Okay. When I was growing up in the 1970s, my mother always warned me when I was going out to parties that it was okay to drink a few beers but never to drink poitín. It reminds me that at the time there was seriously bad alcohol around that is not around today. Some of it comes back to common sense, pragmatism and believing that young people - because they are the ones most at risk - can differentiate between products. They have shown themselves to be able to do this with heroin and other opiates by choosing to use cannabis rather that getting stuck into heroin. The fall-off in the use of heroin over the last 20 years has been incredible. We can copy aspects of the alcohol model, particularly regarding regulation of the types of products available, the licensing systems, the type of outlets, availability to young people and so on. The situation with alcohol is not perfect and it never will be. No regulation system is going to be perfect but we have to start somewhere.

Canada was the western society that started this and other countries have followed its lead. I think there will be less success in the United States because the dollar controls everything there, whereas Canada and the European countries have better regulation systems. We should be looking to those as models.

I want to make a point about how methadone is currently managed. We all have different ailments and illnesses and we deal with different consultancies about different aspects of our bodies all the time. The one person who holds everything together is our GP. If we found a way to get family doctors to take more control of the management and treatment of people who are on methadone, we would dilute all the negativity that goes with specialist treatment centres.