Teenager’s death: Do our drug laws cost lives?
The older we get the more certain we are that youth is indeed wasted on the young.
It is also true that despite getting older we have not worked out how to convince young people not to make the same mistakes we may have made or to avoid life-threatening risk.
Such is human nature even if it can have disastrous consequences.
Cork City coroner Philip Comyn dealt with one disastrous consequence yesterday when he returned a verdict of death by misadventure for Michael Cornacchia, aged 16, who died after taking U47700 and ecstasy at his home in Cork on January 16, 2017.
The coroner warned that young people are playing Russian roulette after it was revealed the teenager thought he was buying cocaine but it turned out to be a powerful opioid.
The teenager’s death came almost two decades after Portugal became the first country to decriminalise the possession and consumption of all illicit substances.
The country’s opioid crisis soon stabilised, and the country has seen dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime, and incarceration rates.
Portugal’s remarkable recovery came about because of an enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction — and itself.
Is it time we followed Portugal’s example?
Would Michael Cornacchia and many others still be alive had we done so already?
