Debate contribution: Ketamine: Reclassification

Debate contribution by Ms Connie Egan on 11 March 2025.

MLA

Ms Connie Egan

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

11 March 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Ketamine: Reclassification

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4855771

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I will start today, as many others have, by paying tribute to Sandra Larmour and her family's campaign to raise awareness on the issue of ketamine, as the motion rightly references. Jeni Larmour, her daughter, sadly passed away after consuming ketamine and alcohol, and Sandra has channelled her grief into tirelessly lobbying and raising awareness. She has publicly said that she does not want Jeni's death to become just another statistic reported on, and I could not agree more. I welcome the opportunity that has been given by the UK Government and the Home Office for a review of the reclassification of ketamine as a class A substance. I agree with the motion. We must facilitate affected families and loved ones being involved in the review. In fact, I will go further and say that previous users or victims of harm relating to ketamine must also be consulted to ensure a truly wrap-around interventionist and preventionist approach to drug use policy frameworks. As mentioned by others around the Chamber today, legal frameworks relating to the misuse of drugs are a reserved matter, particularly looking at the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016. Responsibility for the legislation is for Westminster and the Home Office. However, with that being said, it would be remiss of me not to recognise, as others have done, that all Executive Ministers, including the Justice and Health Ministers, have a responsibility to take any action they can to minimise and end the harm created by drugs. The opportunity for a review of the classification of ketamine is a welcome one. It is a highly dangerous substance, as my colleague Joanne Bunting pointed out earlier, and it is becoming increasingly popular among our younger communities. It has also often been found in the systems of victims of spiking, which is a legal area where our Justice Minister, Naomi Long, is key to strengthening. There have been record levels of use of ketamine in recent years. Home Office statistics estimate that 269,000 people aged between 16 and 59 used ketamine from March 2023 to March 2024. Something that, I thought, would be useful to pull out is that data on users and dealers of ketamine specifically in Northern Ireland is hard to track, and a contributing factor to that is the general class B category it goes under in our reporting systems, instead of having its own specific offence code. In the outworkings of the review, it would be really interesting to explore how, operationally, in Northern Ireland, if it was segmented into a class A substance, we could aggregate police data into a wider, more accurate picture. That would be absolutely vital to producing tangible results, tracking and preventing further use and harm. If class A status is achieved through the review, it will mean that possession of ketamine will result in seven years of prison time instead of five, but the real change will be lifelong imprisonment for supply and production instead of 14 years. Affected families and stakeholders must be consulted on those changes to affirm public confidence to our UK-wide approach. However, within all that, the Alliance Party position is that the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act is outdated and needs reviewed in the long term. As my party colleague Danny Donnelly MLA and others in the Chamber have outlined, we need to look at other ways of supporting vulnerable people who find themselves addicted to substances. The 2021 Northern Ireland Executive substance use strategy, 'Preventing Harm, Empowering Recovery: A Strategic Framework to Tackle the Harm from Substance Use', which was led by the Department of Health, highlighted the need for harm reduction, joined-up working, early intervention and support for recovery. I know that the Justice Minister is committed to playing her part in reducing offending, working with the PSNI to respond to community safety concerns and empowering recovery through supporting alternative approaches such as the substance misuse courts. We need to ensure that our approach to drug misuse is as person-focused as possible. The review of reclassification opens up an opportunity to discuss those matters further. Stakeholder involvement, including families who have lost loved ones and users who are themselves in recovery, must play a key role in that. I finish by thanking Sandra Larmour again for putting the matter on MLAs' agendas and for her tireless work to ensure that no other family has to endure the pain of losing their loved one.

745 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:15 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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