Justice Minister Michael McDowell and Garda Commissioner Noel Conroy launched an unprecedented attack on the judiciary yesterday, accusing some judges of being "soft" on criminals.

The Tanaiste accused judges of ignoring the will of the people and the Oireachtas by handing down lenient sentences in serious drugs cases. He was also critical of "soft judges" allowing hardened criminals out on bail in the face of strong garda objections. Commissioner Conroy said he supported the views.

Five people have died violently since last Friday, including apprentice plumber Anthony Campbell, aged 20, who was shot dead in a Finglas house on Tuesday before gunmen killed their intended target - -- drug lord Martin "Marlo" Hyland.

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LAST week's spate of brutal gangland killings have sparked calls for radical new measures to combat the Northside's gun culture.

The cold-blooded shootings in Finglas and at the IFSC which claimed three lives - including that of an innocent apprentice plumber - have created an unprecedented atmosphere of terror on Northside streets.

Armed gardai are now patrolling parts of Finglas and Cabra but politicians are demanding an emergency response to the latest outrages.

The latest killings began last Tuesday when a loan gunman calmly walked up to a house at Scribblestown Park.

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DRUGS are cheaper than ever across Europe, including Ireland, according to an EU report.

The drop in prices is despite the fact that greater quantities of drugs, particularly cocaine and heroin, are being seized by police and customs officials.

The prices of cannabis, cocaine and amphetamines have dropped in real terms by around 20%, on average across Europe, while the prices of heroin and ecstasy have dropped by almost 50%.

That's according to a five-year analysis of the period 1999 to 2004 by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), the first study of its type.

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'HARD drugs' such as cocaine and heroin are rampant in the city as drug users turn away from cannabis and ecstasy in favour of stronger drugs, warned leading solicitor and Fianna Fail councillor Michael Lanigan.

"These guys are selling cocaine on the weekend and heroin throughout the week," the Fianna Fail representative said. "When you have persons dealing heroin, you have a problem of immense proportions."

Cllr Lanigan said it was essential that Kilkenny respond to the growing use of hard drugs. "That is going to have a more profound effect on community safety and crime than trying to put up CCTV cameras everywhere."

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News That the Midlands Regional Drugs Task Force Is to Finally Publish Theie Long Awaited Action Plan Is to Be Welcomed by All in the Midlands.

Conceived in 2003 as part of a national strategy to deal with the ongoing prelevance of substance abuse across the country, the action plans by the 14 Regional Task Forces across the country will attempt to put in place a strategy based on prevention rather than cure.

That there is a problem in Athlone, and the other Midlands towns, is obvious to anyone who ventures out any day or night of the week.

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A new drugs task force for the Midlands region will be launched tomorrow [Thursday] by Noel Ahern, TD, Minister of State with responsibility for the National Drug Strategy.

This will be the first ever organised plan to tackle substance misuse in the Midlands. The plan will be officially launched in the Tullamore Court Hotel on Thursday November 2.

Speaking before the launch of the Midlands Drug Task Force, Mayor of Athlone Town, John Butler, said that it is very important to have a task force in place to tackle the drugs issue and to give support to people coming off drugs.

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Party pills five times the strength of ecstasy are being sold over the counter because the Government has failed to ban them.

The selection of legal, mind-altering drugs, similar to cocaine, ecstasy and speed, are being legally sold over the counter to anyone aged over 18, in at least 13 so-called 'head stores' around the country, as well as stalls outside big music festivals and gigs.

Support groups are becoming increasingly concerned about the recent explosion of pep pills because they contain the dangerous substance benzylpiperazine (BZP) which acts as a substitute for MDMA, the banned substance in ecstasy and speed pills.

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THE war on drugs is a big operation that has been raging across the world for almost 40 years. It's big, it's mean and it's out there. Yet so are the drugs.

In Ireland it's really starting to hit home just how many illegal drugs are on our streets and the enormous numbers of people who take 'recreational' drugs (which means on a Friday or Saturday night), as well as the habitual users and chronic addicts.

Gerry Cameron, a former police chief in Florida who spent 17 years fighting 'the war on drugs', was in Dublin last week to speak at a public lecture as a guest of the Irish Penal Reform Trust.

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DURING a series of radio interviews this week, Gerry Cameron, a former American police chief, described the current war on drugs as a complete failure.

He knows what he is talking about, having spent 17 years in drug enforcement.

"We'll spend $69 billion in the United States this year," he said. "We'll arrest over a million and a half people for drugs this year in the United States. Little over half of that will be for marijuana and approximately 80% of that will be charged with simple possession. We've got tremendous police resources being diverted to put people in the penitentiary that have never done a violent act towards any person or their property." While I was at university in Texas from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s the penalty for possession of any amount of marijuana - or cannabis as it is more commonly called here - - was a jail sentence of from two years to life. Yet a survey conducted at the university found that 80% of the senior class smoked marijuana.

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A MCDONALD's Big Mac is a greater threat to public health than cannabis - and Ireland should lift its ban on hard drugs, a controversial former American law enforcement official declared yesterday

Ex-US police chief and anti-prohibition campaigner Jerry Cameron urged the Government to legalise marijuana and heroin if it wanted to win the war on drugs.

But he drew the ire of anti-drugs campaigners who called for an investigation into his appearance at a public forum in Dublin.

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NO Irish Government is going to legalise cannabis because it causes cancer, a former Minister of State with responsibility for drugs said yesterday. Fianna Fail MEP Eoin Ryan said the State would end up being sued in the courts if it legalised cannabis, similar to tobacco companies being sued in relation to cigarettes.

He was speaking at a conference in Dublin, which also heard calls from a retired US chief of police for an end to the war on drugs and a move towards legalisation. Mr Ryan said: a€oeWhat politician is going to get up and say legalise drugs. The problem is if a minister wanted to legalise cannabis, he would get endless amounts of medical evidence that cannabis is carcinogenic.a€

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The Government looked at legalising heroin in 2001, a former junior minister has claimed.

Eoin Ryan MEP told The Irish Times that he and Government officials visited Holland and Switzerland between 2001 and 2002 where heroin is dispensed to addicts for self-injection in designated clinics. Mr Ryan was minister of state with responsibility for the National Drugs Strategy from 2000 to 2002.

"We looked at it to see how the heroin issue was being dealt with in Europe but in the event we came to the conclusion that legalisation was a very drastic step." He said that those addicts who were being prescribed heroin ended up using it for the rest of their lives. "The medical advice was that it was more realistic to get people off methadone."

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The prohibition against illicit street drugs should be ended as hard-line legislation against drugs is doomed to failure, a US police chief warned today.

Jerry Cameron, a police veteran with 17 years experience, urged the Irish Government not to make the same mistakes the United States has made in its war on drugs.

Mr Cameron said there was ample evidence the hard-line crackdown with severe prison sentences for possession of street drugs such as cannabis and heroin in America had failed to deal with the problem.

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SHOULD Michael MacDowell ever do Desert Island Discs, his list is unlikely to include the song Contemplating Contempt by obscure Nineties Irish rockers The Far Canals. The lyrics work better sung than read: "Write the law on a piece of paper/ Roll it up into a reefer/ Burn it!/ Smoke it!/ That's all it's worth!"

Despite rave reviews for their album, the band never really took off (which was particularly unfortunate for me, as their manager). But maybe they were just ahead of their time. If the results of last week's Oireachtas report on drugs can be believed, more than 300,000 Irish citizens now agree that our cannabis laws aren't worth the paper they're written on.

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Research commissioned by an Oireachtas committee has reportedly found that 300,000 young Irish people are regular users of cannabis.

Reports this morning said the study had found that most of those using cannabis are between the ages of 16 and 25, with 28,000 admitting to being dependent on the drug.

Some 5,000 Irish 16-year-olds reportedly admit to using cannabis, twice the EU average.

The findings are contained in a study due to published tomorrow by the Oireachtas committee on community, rural and Gaeltacht affairs.

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The police and political response to the murder of the journalist and mother Veronica Guerin - whose 10th anniversary falls tomorrow - resulted in only limited success. Despite a vast investigation, only one of the many involved was convicted, and even that single conviction may be overturned.

Although a raft of legislation was passed in the immediate aftermath of the journalist's death, the number of so-called gangland murders has since increased, and the amount of illegal drugs sold and consumed has multiplied.

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THE number of people seeking treatment for cocaine abuse has doubled, according to new national figures.

The data shows that 311 people reported cocaine as their main drug of abuse in 2003, compared to 155 in 2002.

A further 2,244 people said cocaine was a secondary problem drug in addition to their main drug of abuse, such as heroin. This compares to 1,716 in 2002 an increase of 30%. The two figures combined show that 2,555 people reported cocaine as one of their problem drugs in 2003, compared to 1,871 in 2002.

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MORE than eight-in-10 drug users who are on methadone to wean them off heroin continue to use cannabis, and some also use cocaine regularly, according to new research.

A study of multi-drug use among methadone-treated patients of the Health

Service Executive (HSE), North Dublin, found:

Of more than three-quarters of methadone patients with a history of cocaine use, more than one-third had used it within the last month.

12% of methadone users were also using cocaine daily.

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DRUG-RELATED admissions to Ireland's psychiatric hospitals have more than doubled since 1990, according to a new report on psychiatric services.

While approximately 105 patients were admitted to psychiatric hospitals with drug-related disorders 16 years ago, this had increased to more than 294 in 2001. The stabilisation of admissions since has been credited to an increase in the community services that treat drug addiction.

"It's simply mirroring what's going on in the community," said Dermot Walsh, one of the authors of Activities of Irish Psychiatric Services 2004, published by the Health Research Board. "There's been an increase in illegal drug use."

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Teachers today attacked the sale of a "totally unacceptable" book on drug addiction to primary schools.

The book, Issues 1, A Child Protection Handbook, provides details of drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin.

The Irish National Teachers Organisation (INTO) said the material was totally unacceptable for children at primary level.

Its general secretary, John Carr, said: "The books contain detailed information on drugs, particularly speed, cocaine, heroin, magic mushrooms, ecstasy, solvents and amphetamines. It's geared totally for an older person and is not suitable for children at a primary school level."

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