Minister In Charge Of Drugs Strategy Required To Sample Them All

MINISTER of the State at the Department of Health Aodhán Ó Ríordáin has been given the responsibility to head up the new National Drugs Strategy programme.

With this new role comes several requirements with the most important being that ‘a minister must have intimate knowledge of all illegal substances currently available in Ireland’, meaning Ó Ríordáin has the enviable task of taking all of the banned substances in an attempt to better understand the growing drug problem in Ireland.

Ó Ríordáin’s first official act as a junior minister with responsibility will be to head to Ibiza with an official Government delegation, descending on some of the more notorious nightclubs there.

“It’s a tough task, but we’ve every confidence in Aodhán’s ability to get completely mashed of it and come back to us with ways to tackle the drug abuse problems here at home,” Minister for Health Leo Varadkar told WWN.

Ó Ríordáin has been given an initial deadline of the 25th of May in which to sample cannabis, cocaine, speed, crack, ecstasy, heroin and many other drugs.

The minister had stated he felt a tad ‘anxious, and a little paranoid’ at the journey ahead but a government spokesman pointed out Ó Ríordáin had already tried cocaine earlier this week.

“It is important to go into policy forming with open eyes, and an experienced jaw that has chewed the night away,” Varadkar added.

Once finished his official Government engagement in Ibiza, Ó Ríordáin will set off for the Mojave Desert in California for the next leg of his drugs completion programme; hallucinogenics.

This new and possibly controversial approach to research and policy making is seen as a break from tradition as several other Government departments have usually gone for the more conventional approach of naming a former teacher as Minister for Finance.