Understanding and preventing drug-related interpersonal violence in Ireland through a public health approach

There is an unresolved tension between the growing emphasis on public health approaches to illicit drug use and to interpersonal violence in some quarters, and the common refrain that drug-related violence is best resolved through law enforcement and criminalisation in others. It is timely, therefore, to analyse these concepts together and through an interdisciplinary lens, exploring how we conceptualise and prevent illicit drug-related interpersonal violence from a public health perspective. This essay explores public health approaches to preventing illicit drug-related interpersonal violence. We situate our analysis in Ireland, where our work is primarily based, and where we feel there is some potential to drive forward public health approaches. We start by outlining some key messages from the empirical literature on the dynamics of illicit drug-related interpersonal violence in Ireland. Next, we seek to map the typology of violence and the World Health Organisation (WHO) ecological model of violence onto evidence-informed approaches to prevention from public health. Finally, we identify some of the approaches which could help Ireland reimagine efforts to prevent at least some forms of drug-related interpersonal violence, while avoiding the harms of criminalisation.