This week, a cross-party committee of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament, recommended that Ireland decriminalise the possession of all drugs for personal use, agreeing with a verdict Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly on Drug Use had reached two years earlier. It’s a recommendation, not yet a law, and the Irish government’s reaction was cautious rather than celebratory. Even so, it puts Ireland a step ahead of where Britain has managed to get on a question that, on the evidence, Britain’s own institutions settled a generation ago.

Twenty-six years ago, to be precise. In 2000, the Police Foundation’s independent inquiry into the Misuse of Drugs Act found that prosecuting people for cannabis possession caused more harm than it prevented and fell hardest on Black and minority communities, and recommended downgrading the drug to class C. The government’s first response was to rule out any change at all. Cannabis was eventually moved down a notch in 2004, only to be reclassified straight back up (to Class B) in 2009, against the explicit advice of the government’s own scientific advisers. When the chair of that advisory body, David Nutt, said publicly that alcohol causes more harm than cannabis or ecstasy, the Home Secretary sacked him. Asked about it, the Home Secretary told the Guardian the issue was “of course a political rather than a scientific point.”

A decade later, two parliamentary committees reached the same conclusion all over again: the Scottish Affairs Committee and the Commons Health and Social Care Committee, which recommended decriminalising personal possession and moving lead responsibility to the health department. The government’s written response ran to one line: it did not support decriminalisation. The Home Affairs Committee said much the same in 2022 and 2023. Last year, Sadiq Khan’s London Drugs Commission recommended decriminalising cannabis specifically, and was overruled within days by Angela Rayner. Keir Starmer has held that line since the last election, saying he had “no intention” of changing the law and didn’t think it needed much debate.

Six independent bodies, four governments, two parties, one answer, ignored every time. Nobody serious has argued the evidence points the other way. What’s been disputed, every time, is whether acting on it is worth the political risk. There’s a word for that, and it isn’t caution or prudence. It’s cowardice, and twenty-six years and several thousand preventable deaths is long enough to call it that plainly. In 2024, drug deaths in England and Wales hit a record high for the twelfth year running, with deaths linked to nitazenes, the synthetic opioids cut into the heroin supply, nearly quadrupling in a single year.

Drug reform isn’t actually risky. Portugal removed criminal penalties for possession in 2001, and the policy still has cross-party support because drug deaths and HIV infections both fell and stayed down. A comparative study just published in The Lancet Psychiatry backs that up: it’s commercialised, for-profit cannabis markets that are linked to higher rates of use and disorder, not decriminalisation or properly regulated supply on their own. The honest counter-example is British Columbia, where decriminalisation including public use collapsed under its own public order problems and was allowed to lapse entirely this January. The lesson isn’t that decriminalisation failed. It’s that nobody planned for what happens in public, exactly the gap Ireland’s committee tried to close this week with local byelaws on consumption.

That’s the version of this policy we should be arguing for. It’s already set out properly in my policy project A Just Society’s own Drug Reform for Justice and Care: decriminalisation paired honestly with a public order answer, a regulated cannabis market with potency limits and outlet controls rather than a commercial free-for-all, and medical-grade prescribing pilots for heroin and other high-risk drugs, the actual answer to a street supply increasingly cut with nitazenes, rather than leaving the safety of what people use to organised crime. The revenue that follows gets directed first at treatment and the communities that twenty-six years of enforcement have fallen hardest on.

There’s also a live political question attached to all this. Keir Starmer announced his resignation as Labour leader on 22 June. His likely successor, Andy Burnham, has admitted his own past cannabis use but hasn’t said where he stands on changing the law itself. Whoever leads Labour next will have exactly the same evidence every leader has had since 2000. The only thing that’s ever actually changed is the death toll. We’ve had the right answer for a decade. What we’re still waiting for is someone with the nerve to use it.

* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.