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Note: this article covers developments from 12 to 18 October and was due to appear on 19 October. Technical problems with the site, and the sisyphean demands of my degree, delayed it. Dates and statuses below were rechecked on 24 October
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Ireland has accepted its citizens’ call for a ‘health-led’ response to drug possession, while keeping possession a crime. In this article I talk about what that means in practice (and where cannabis fits). We’ll also look at how US regulators are trying to separate the kratom plant from its stronger derivatives, as well as who now owns much of the supply in the Netherlands’ state cannabis experiment.
Ireland: one principle, three meanings
On 13 October the Irish government published its National Drugs Strategy 2026–2030. It is a long, comprehensive document, built around five pillars and grounded in the social causes of drug harm, from poverty and trauma to homelessness. It is also, perhaps, another sign of how far Ireland’s social outlook has shifted, from the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2015 to abortion reform in 2018.
One part of the strategy is worth looking at more closely: how Ireland deals with people caught possessing drugs for personal use. Alongside the strategy, the government published its response to the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use. The Assembly had called for “a comprehensive health-led response to possession of drugs for personal use”, and the government’s response was a simple “Accept”. Yet, as is so often the case with policy, behind that apparent agreement lies a more complicated picture. The Citizens’ Assembly, a parliamentary committee and the government have all endorsed the principle of a health-led approach, but arrived at rather different interpretations of what it should involve.
So is this another step in Ireland’s wider social transformation? Or does the government’s embrace of a health-led approach amount to less of a policy change than might first appear?
Three positions
The Citizens’ Assembly, chaired by former HSE chief executive Paul Reid, brought together 99 randomly selected members of the public and reported in January 2024. It called for a balance between “health diversion, dissuasion and decriminalisation”, without specifying whether this should involve changing the law or changing how existing laws are enforced.
The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Drugs Use, set up to examine the Assembly’s recommendations, went a step further. Its final report, published in June, called for the repeal of section 3 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977, which makes possession a criminal offence, “in order to fully decriminalise the possession of drugs for personal use”. It also argued that diversion should be voluntary and uncapped, and that reform should cover all drugs.
The government, meanwhile, has accepted the Assembly’s recommendation in principle but stopped short of the legal change proposed by the Committee. It describes its new Health Referral Scheme as reflecting “the principle of depenalisation for a first offence”.
A note on semantics
Four terms are worth distinguishing:
- Health-led: a broad principle rather than a specific legal category. It can mean different things and is compatible with several different laws, depending on how it is put into practice.
- Diversion: steers people away from prosecution towards education, treatment or other support. Possession remains a criminal offence.
- Depenalisation: keeps the offence on the books, but reduces or removes the penalties imposed in practice.
- Decriminalisation: possession for personal use is no longer a criminal offence, although civil penalties, such as fines, may still apply.
These broadly follow the categories used in a review by Alex Stevens, Caitlin Hughes and colleagues in the European Journal of Criminology. By those standards, Ireland’s scheme is diversion: those who accept a referral avoid prosecution, but the underlying law remains unchanged.
What happens on the street
Since 1 September, adults caught with a small quantity of drugs for personal use can be referred to the health service instead of being prosecuted, according to An Garda Síochána. There are conditions. To qualify, someone must have no previous drug conviction or adult caution, admit to possessing the drugs and agree to the referral. “If a person does not accept the referral, they will be prosecuted.” Intriguingly, the government says there is no penalty for accepting a referral and then failing to attend.
The referral is available once. Someone caught a second time may receive an adult caution, but cautions are currently available only for cannabis. For other drugs, prosecution remains the usual route. The government has promised to evaluate the scheme after its first year and to consider extending cautions to other substances. If it does, it would follow similar moves elsewhere: Scotland extended police warnings to Class A drugs in 2021, and New South Wales introduced an early drug diversion scheme in 2024.
Where cannabis fits
Cannabis is where the Assembly came closest to something more radical. In the first round of voting on cannabis, 36 members backed legalisation and regulation against 23 for a health-led response; only after other options were eliminated did the health-led approach win, by 39 votes to 38. The Committee called for that near-even split to be debated further, while arguing that any reform of possession laws should cover all drugs rather than cannabis alone.
In practice, cannabis is already treated differently: it is the only drug for which an adult caution, rather than prosecution, is available on a second occasion. The strategy also notes a “growing diversification of consumer products” in the cannabis market. Its possession measures, however, change how cannabis users are processed rather than the legal status of what they use.
The case for the government
To be fair to the government, the Citizens’ Assembly never explicitly demanded a change in the law, so a cautious interpretation of its recommendation is not unreasonable. There is also evidence that diversion can make a real difference. A 2024 evidence summary from UNSW’s Drug Policy Modelling Program reported positive health outcomes in all the studies of police diversion that measured them. Meanwhile, an evidence review for the New South Wales Ministry of Health found that decriminalisation reduced drug-related arrests, but that evidence on most other outcomes was “limited and often contradictory”.
In other words, there are reasons to take diversion seriously as a policy in its own right, rather than dismissing it as a watered-down version of decriminalisation.
What the label conceals
Even if the government’s interpretation is compatible with the Assembly’s open-ended recommendation, the practical distinction still matters. Under the government’s scheme, someone must first admit to a criminal offence to qualify for a referral, and they get that opportunity only once. That is quite different from removing possession from the criminal law altogether. Both can be described as ‘health-led’, but the consequences for someone caught with drugs are not the same. That is what the shared language risks obscuring.
There are also questions about how the scheme will work in practice. Could it draw more people into contact with the criminal justice system? And what happens to those caught more than once? There is not yet enough evidence to answer either question: the scheme was first announced in 2019 and began only this September.
The road ahead
The scheme’s first-year evaluation should therefore make for interesting reading. Among the things worth watching: how many people are offered referrals, how many accept them, and what happens when someone encounters the police again. Whether cautions expand beyond cannabis will matter too. These decisions will tell us more about Ireland’s commitment to a health-led approach than the language of the strategy itself.
Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies have previously helped pave the way for major social reforms, notably the change to abortion law in 2018. But giving citizens a voice in shaping policy and translating their recommendations into law are two different things. On drugs, the Assembly left considerable room for interpretation, and the government has chosen a more cautious route than the parliamentary committee recommended.
For now, the distinction is fairly simple: Ireland has changed how some cases of drug possession are handled, without changing the fact that possession itself remains a crime. Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir.
Kratom and hemp: where does the plant end?
On 14 October the Drug Enforcement Administration published a notice of intent to place two kratom-related compounds, 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) and mitragynine pseudoindoxyl (MGPI), temporarily in Schedule I, but only above set thresholds.
Law and proposal need separating. MGPI has been in Schedule I since 26 August under an earlier temporary order, with no threshold, and that control remains in force. 7-OH has not yet been scheduled. The new order cannot be published before 13 November; it would replace the August control on MGPI and supersede a July proposal for 7-OH, now withdrawn.
July’s version would have controlled kratom leaf above 0.05% 7-OH, and processed products above 0.05% or above 1 milligram of 7-OH per product. The October version, following advice from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), drops the per-product limit. A product would be controlled if it fails either of two tests:
- Concentration: 7-OH or MGPI, alone or combined, above 1mg per gram (or per millilitre for liquids).
- Ratio: less than 100 times as much mitragynine, kratom’s main alkaloid, as 7-OH and MGPI. HHS says this separates “concentrated or chemically altered” products from botanical kratom; in effect, it compares a product’s chemical make-up with that typical of the leaf. A ratio measures relative composition; it cannot by itself prove where a product came from or how it was made.
DEA acknowledges the new threshold “would permit certain products to remain in the marketplace” and that “neither HHS nor DEA has made a finding that these substances are safe to use at below-threshold levels.” Neither the notice nor HHS’s announcement explains how the numbers were chosen, and the HHS letter behind them is unpublished. Discussing its forensic data, DEA also notes “a lack of readily available analytical reference standards”, a hint that applying both tests will not be simple.
Hemp is heading the other way. According to the Congressional Research Service, from 12 November (as I’m sure you all kno by now) cannabinoids that cannot be produced naturally by the plant, or are synthesised outside it, fall outside the federal definition of hemp. From 11 December, final products face a limit of 0.4mg of total THC and similar cannabinoids per container, meaning the innermost retail packaging. That caps the package, not each dose: a multi-serving pack must fit all its servings within 0.4mg. How the rule treats individually wrapped servings is not yet clear. The FDA’s promised cannabinoid lists and further container guidance, due in February, had not appeared in the Federal Register when I checked on 16 October, and we found no sign of them by 24 October (today) either.
A concentration limit targets potency, a per-package cap targets total quantity and a ratio targets resemblance to the natural plant. Each catches different products, and each depends on testing regulators have not fully set out.
The Netherlands: who owns the experiment’s supply?
On 15 October Cronos Group completed its purchase of CanAdelaar, for a base price of €57.5 million. CanAdelaar grows for the wietexperiment, the Dutch government’s trial of a closed, state-licensed supply chain for coffeeshops in ten municipalities. Cronos says CanAdelaar supplies nearly all of the trial’s 69 coffeeshops and, citing a management survey, that it leads the market (we have found no independent figures).
The trial allows at most ten growers, chosen by lottery and then screened under the Bibob Act, which lets Dutch authorities refuse or revoke permits where there is a serious risk of criminal misuse. Cronos’s SEC filing says its Dutch subsidiary waived all closing conditions while “the final, non-appealable decision from the Minister of Health, Welfare, and Sport” on the Bibob review, and related advice of the National Bibob Office, “remained outstanding”. I found no announcement of a decision by 24 October. One seller, Ring International Holding, will indemnify Cronos if CanAdelaar’s designation is revoked as a result; the other was Landewyck Tobacco.
The buyer has tobacco links too: Altria held 41% of Cronos at the end of 2025. The filing also deducts €12.5 million for a proposed, not yet imposed, penalty from the regional environmental agency DCMR over alleged odour nuisance.
None of this shows wrongdoing. But a trial designed to test whether regulated supply can work will partly be testing how one large, internationally owned grower performs. A parliamentary committee debate on drug policy is scheduled for 11 November.
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