> Between December 2020 and last February, a total of 5,139 people were given an official caution compared with the 17,125 people who were prosecuted.
This does not mean “three times more likely”, this means “three times as many”. We don’t know the details of any of those cases and can’t say that they’re even close to equal. You can’t deduce the probability of receiving a prosecution based on this data alone.
The Irish Times is a rag.
What’s a caution ? Them saying “ok, look don’t do it again” when they catch you at it ??
Badly written headline “More than 23% people caught with cannabis not prosecuted” would be a better one. Or “Less than 80% of people caught with cannabis prosecuted”.
Because the expectation under the current law is that when you are caught you are prosecuted (and maybe we could do something about it as more than 20% are given a free pass already).
So much for the “health-lead approach” that’s supposedly been in operation for a number of years already. This is the reality. Gardai continue to prosecute people for minor amounts of cannabis, tarnishing future career prospects.
How do they expect an already crumbling HSE to cope with having to deal with “treating” thousands of people caught with small amounts of cannabis?
Answer: They won’t, the gardai and courts will deal with them. As they do now.
Countries and states with similar population size to Ireland have seen billions raised in tax from the regulated sale of cannabis. This money could be used to give funds to our healthcare system.
Instead we make policies that put the healthcare system, courts and prison system under even more pressure.
Real health matters and real crimes could be dealt with more efficiently and fairly if cannabis was legalised.
We have people walking free after badly assaulting random women in the street while the courts, gardai and prisons get clogged up with minor drug crimes.
We have a collapsed healthcare system and now we’re going to burden it even further with having to schedule and attend appointments for people caught with small amounts of cannabis.
The regulated sale of cannabis could support our healthcare system instead of burdening it.
The real conundrum: if you r*pe someone while having cannabis on your person.
Call me a cynic, but IMO this boils down very simply to easy pickings for them to be “busy” at work and have plenty of arrests and enforcement for their statistics, without actually doing anything particularly taxing or difficult. I’m obviously not referring to every individual Garda with this comment, many of them do tackle the serious shit and they take great risks in doing so, but in my very cynical opinion this boils down to “we’ve had two calls come in, one involves a drunk and belligerent lad who’s been threatening to hit people with a broken bottle, fuck that sounds scary AF and I’d rather not risk getting glassed myself, but it’s my job so… Wait a minute, do I smell weed? Excellent, I’ll arrest this guy and be ‘busy’ booking him in for the next half an hour, and hopefully when I’m done, the drunken brawl will have sorted itself out and I won’t have to get my hands dirty”.
Cynical sure. But I’m absolutely certain this is at least *part* of the problem. Low hanging fruit, essentially, so they can say they’ve done a busy night’s work while avoiding any situations that could get genuinely hairy or unpleasant. “Sorry, I couldn’t do anything about the six lads beating the shite out of eachother outside the club on D’Olier St, I was around the corner at College Green where someone was smoking a joint”.
I live in cork, but very rarely hang around in the city. I was there this weekend and I saw and smelled people smoking cannabis. I guess there is a chance it could have been CBD, but their eyes looked stoned. Gardai literally walked past them and ignored it. I don’t know if this is a regular thing, but I find it hard to correlate the story with what I saw this weekend.
8 comments
Badly written headline.
> Between December 2020 and last February, a total of 5,139 people were given an official caution compared with the 17,125 people who were prosecuted.
This does not mean “three times more likely”, this means “three times as many”. We don’t know the details of any of those cases and can’t say that they’re even close to equal. You can’t deduce the probability of receiving a prosecution based on this data alone.
The Irish Times is a rag.
What’s a caution ? Them saying “ok, look don’t do it again” when they catch you at it ??
Badly written headline “More than 23% people caught with cannabis not prosecuted” would be a better one. Or “Less than 80% of people caught with cannabis prosecuted”.
Because the expectation under the current law is that when you are caught you are prosecuted (and maybe we could do something about it as more than 20% are given a free pass already).
So much for the “health-lead approach” that’s supposedly been in operation for a number of years already. This is the reality. Gardai continue to prosecute people for minor amounts of cannabis, tarnishing future career prospects.
How do they expect an already crumbling HSE to cope with having to deal with “treating” thousands of people caught with small amounts of cannabis?
Answer: They won’t, the gardai and courts will deal with them. As they do now.
Countries and states with similar population size to Ireland have seen billions raised in tax from the regulated sale of cannabis. This money could be used to give funds to our healthcare system.
Instead we make policies that put the healthcare system, courts and prison system under even more pressure.
Real health matters and real crimes could be dealt with more efficiently and fairly if cannabis was legalised.
We have people walking free after badly assaulting random women in the street while the courts, gardai and prisons get clogged up with minor drug crimes.
We have a collapsed healthcare system and now we’re going to burden it even further with having to schedule and attend appointments for people caught with small amounts of cannabis.
The regulated sale of cannabis could support our healthcare system instead of burdening it.
The real conundrum: if you r*pe someone while having cannabis on your person.
Call me a cynic, but IMO this boils down very simply to easy pickings for them to be “busy” at work and have plenty of arrests and enforcement for their statistics, without actually doing anything particularly taxing or difficult. I’m obviously not referring to every individual Garda with this comment, many of them do tackle the serious shit and they take great risks in doing so, but in my very cynical opinion this boils down to “we’ve had two calls come in, one involves a drunk and belligerent lad who’s been threatening to hit people with a broken bottle, fuck that sounds scary AF and I’d rather not risk getting glassed myself, but it’s my job so… Wait a minute, do I smell weed? Excellent, I’ll arrest this guy and be ‘busy’ booking him in for the next half an hour, and hopefully when I’m done, the drunken brawl will have sorted itself out and I won’t have to get my hands dirty”.
Cynical sure. But I’m absolutely certain this is at least *part* of the problem. Low hanging fruit, essentially, so they can say they’ve done a busy night’s work while avoiding any situations that could get genuinely hairy or unpleasant. “Sorry, I couldn’t do anything about the six lads beating the shite out of eachother outside the club on D’Olier St, I was around the corner at College Green where someone was smoking a joint”.
I live in cork, but very rarely hang around in the city. I was there this weekend and I saw and smelled people smoking cannabis. I guess there is a chance it could have been CBD, but their eyes looked stoned. Gardai literally walked past them and ignored it. I don’t know if this is a regular thing, but I find it hard to correlate the story with what I saw this weekend.