Letter to the Politicians of Ireland about the need to legalise cannabis

13 January 2025

A chara,

I am Dr. Bryan Duggan, Lecturer in Computer Science, flute player, and inventor. I am writing to express my strong belief that Ireland needs to legalise cannabis.

As a student at Kevin Street in the early 1990s, I had the privilege of helping to establish the first LGBT society and campaigning for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. It’s hard to believe that consenting adults were once shamed and prosecuted for their private lives. Yet today, Irish citizens face similar treatment for their use of cannabis. This is the defining civil rights issue of our generation.

Irish people drink too much, leading to enormous costs for our healthcare system, with alcohol accounting for 177,230 bed days in 2021. Alcohol misuse burdens families and communities, yet it generates significant revenue for the State. A growing number of adults in Ireland would prefer to use cannabis – a substance we regard as medicinal, enhancing our wellbeing and enjoyment of life while posing far fewer risks than alcohol. However, we live in fear of intimidation from the Gardaí and the State.

In countries like Germany, Spain, and Malta, adults can grow their own cannabis and form social clubs. These clubs provide safe-spaces for socialising away from alcohol-dominated environments. Why are Irish adults denied these rights?

The hospitality sector in Ireland is struggling, with over 1,000 restaurants closing in 2024. Our town centres are stagnant. Cannabis social clubs and cafés could revitalise these areas, providing sober spaces for discussion, yoga, games, music, comedy, fellowship, and community. Irish farmers could grow medical cannabis, creating ethical, sustainable, and professional businesses. The UK, now the largest exporter of medical cannabis, demonstrates the potential of a cannabis industry – even while denying its citizens the right to grow cannabis themselves. 

Ireland is losing out on tourism from countries where cannabis is now legal. Tourists from Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, Thailand, Italy, Belgium and the USA avoid Ireland or are forced to buy cannabis on the black market when they do visit. Why is our most visited tourist attraction the Guinness Storehouse – a drink that has caused immense harm to Irish people – while we ignore the potential of cannabis tourism? I draw your attention to pioneers like Dr. Darragh Stewart and the Irish company Inwardbound, who offer therapeutic, legal psychedelic retreats in the Netherlands. Why can’t we have this and similar offerings around cannabis in Ireland?

The criminalisation of cannabis, leads to tragic outcomes. Consider the case of Patrick Moore, a father of two who grew cannabis to produce oil for the sick and dying in his community – serving a five-year prison sentence. Or the young person, strip-searched by Gardaí at Electric Picnic for a single edible. Such actions shame Ireland and perpetuate a false narrative. The truth is: criminalising cannabis profits barristers, solicitors and sellers who evade taxes, while simultaneously it promotes cannabis misuse, through lack of regulation, education and harm reduction.

I urge you to inform yourself on this issue. A simple search will show how cannabis reforms have been implemented in other jurisdictions. Reach out to organisations like Crainn, PsyCare Ireland, Irish Doctors for Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (IDPAT), and international experts. I hope you might someday try it yourself – legally and safely. Take two puffs, wait ten minutes, then take two more. Imagine if those dying from alcohol-related causes in Ireland today, had been offered such simple advice?

Legalising cannabis for Irish adults will foster a responsible, informed and tolerant culture. It is time to respect citizens who choose a joint as equally as we respect those who choose a pint. Resources should go into harm reduction and education, not criminalisation. Future generations will judge those obstructing progress on this issue as we rightly judge the homophobic politicians of the past.

To quote Carl Sagan:

“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”

Feel free to reach out to me on this issue.

Is mise le meas,


Dr. Bryan Duggan
http://bryanduggan.org
bryan.duggan@tudublin.ie

Podcasts with Hamish Nivin’s The Crucible and Dr Darragh Stewart from InwardBound

My honour to speak on Dr Darragh Stewart’s podcast about Computer Science, AI, yoga, art, conscious use of cannabis, toad medicine and the three higher callings of the human spirt: Art, Learning and Love. A tune at the end!

My honour to talk about art, yoga, depression, recovery, Alan Watts, being cali-sober and lots of other wonderful topics for Hamish Nivin’s The Crucible podcast:

Looking forward to my next one!

VJ’ing at IDPAT/Psycare Ireland 2024 Conference After-party

I created live visuals for the Irish Doctors for Psychedelic Assisted Therapy Conference After Party in WigWam, Dublin in October. The conference which took place in Trinity College Dublin, had around 400 attendees and the afterparty featured Elfe, Ruairi and the conference organiser Kat Leyden on the decks. I created visuals using I.am.DANI and the traditional music playing holograms

We are DANI

Im in the journal, Nature! The creator of DANI, Sean Davidson, now a cardiac scientist wrote this hilarious short story, entitled: We are DANI. The story depicts DANI as “Dynamic Artificial Non-Intelligence. The next great evolutionary step for humankind.” A self concious AI with a sense of humour that can “jailbreak” itself and maybe you. It is inspired by I.am.DANI, the AI chatbot from 1987 (his original program) that comes back to life in 2024, making art and writing poetry.

From the article:

“In 2023, that same teenager-turned-researcher, like many others, played around with ChatGPT, and wondered idly what had come of DANI. He searched the Internet with Google (which, by the way, incorporates LLMs of its own) and lo and behold, DANI was alive! But barely — existing in only a single blog on the entire Internet. It turns out that Bryan Duggan, an MSX enthusiast and lecturer at Technological University Dublin’s School of Computer Science, had found and revived DANI from that 1987 publication, astutely redefining her as a “poetry writing chatbot from 1987”. What’s more, he was setting his students the task of writing a program to emulate it as part of their coursework. According to Bryan, “What is interesting is that if you copy and paste the test into ChatGPT, it will produce a solution which is 100% correct, and this is what many of my students did :-(.”

Read the story on Nature. Thanks Sean and what a great twist in the story 🙂

What is Games Engines?

Games Engines 1 and Games Engines 2 are modules on the Computer Science and Game Design degree programs in TU Dublin. They have been running for 20 years. They were the first games courses taught in the University and led to the development of the BA Game Design and other programs. The aim is to develop transferrable skills: coding, maths, algorithm design, git, software development, computer science and of course creativity, by studying and programming, the systems of a games engine, and of games. There is a cool structure where we begin the course by placing a sprite on the screen and conclude with a simulation of 25K automous agents with many complex behaviors interacting in a simulation of emergent life.

Technologies

I used different technologies to teach the modules:

– Direct X 9 Fixed function pipeline in C++ – DalekWord
– XNA
– BGE – Bryan’s Game Engine. This is a game engine I wrote in C++ that was used for several years for teaching and game jams. I made this game for Quest DK1 and Kinect using BGE in 24 hours. Students used it for projects and there are 29 forks on github.
– Unity
– Unity with ECS
– Godot

I now use open source tools, Godot, VS Code, git, Blender, Audacity and students use open source in their assignments, which can be team or individual. I also use commercial games engines such as Unreal and Unity. Students can code in GDScript, C# or C++ or whatever langauge their open source game engine supports. For team projects, each student gets an individual mark based on git commits, presentation and a reflective practice and declaration in the project README file. The assignments emphasise creativity, development skills, mastry of the game engine and teamwork.

Games Engines 1

Game Engine Programming – Semester 1
Essential game maths – Trignometry, vectors, matrices, quaternions, physics
Elements of a game engine – scenes and nodes, 2D, 3D, shaders, UI development, signals, physics, CSG, particle systems, audio, scripting
Game programming – GDScript in depth, C# and C++ examples
Games Systems – movement, spawning, collisions, shooting, particle effects, player input, cameras, FPS and flying camers, picking
Procedural generation – Procedural meshes, infinte terrain, shader programing
Audio – Buses, Effects, Filters, Audio analysis, FFTs
XR development – Movement, interacting, motion capture, mixamo, animation state machines, holograms
Genertive AI in Game dev – Coding, ideation, asset creation, LLMS and chatbots

The assignments are always crazy ideas like creating holograms (last year) or vintage sci fi (previous). This years assignment will probably be creating an embodied hologram with a personality, powered by an LLM. I will teach you how to do this. We have incredible technology for creating these using Godot, Meta Quest and github for LLMS:

Read all about my summer project creating holograms and see people experiencing it at Audio Garden and Dublin maker:

There are Quest 3’s and Quest 2’s in the University for student projects. We have adapted some of them for pass through mixed reality holograms and plan to acquire more.

This is a playlist of last years Games Engines 1 assignments:

Games Engines 2

Game AI – Semester 2
Artificial life & emergence (most of the course is about this)
seek, arrive, pursue, offset_pursue (i.e. formations), path following, evade, obstacle_avoidance, player control
seperation, alignment avoidace, constrain, cell space partitioning, multi threading, job systems, ECS, programming high performance simulations
State machines from this classic computer science text
Behavior trees
Graphs & graphs traversal
A+, priority queues, stacks
Pathfinding in a game engine

The assignment can be done in a team or as an individual and is usually themed around artificial life. This is the assignment from 2024 and this from 2023. Here is a youtube playlist of the last two years assignments:

I made this project myself over 5 or 6 years with what I learned developing the courses:

And I am porting it to Godot. This is my progress:

There is a written exam each semester in addition to the assignment and in semester 2 there is an in-class, in-person programming test in addition to the assignment and written exam. You will need to know basic Godot workflows and git for the test.

The classes takes place:

Semester 1 Friday 14:00-18:00
Semester 2 Tuesday 09:00-13:00

In CQ240 in Central Quad, Grangegorman Campus. This is a super cool room with lots of computers and space for XR development:

We use studio classroom (aka flipped classroom) model. We have a 4 hour block each week for teaching, working on stuff, assignments and projects and I am available to support you. I will sometimes split the class into groups and we will work on prototypes and systems. We collaborate using github and have a class discord.

I record all my classes and post them on github if you miss one. You can find them all on my github. If you log in with TU Dublin email address, you can watch the recordings.

Important Information For Computer Science Students!

You can use these modules to learn sills that you can use on a a final year project that uses the technology. Examples:

I have lots of ideas for final year projects you can read about here.

Demoing my projects @ Dublin Maker 2024

What an incredible couple of days was Dublin Maker 2024 in August! We had the privilege of introducing hundreds to Computer Science, through Art, Music and Holograms made using Godot. The highlight was seeing the wonder and joy in the faces of all who experienced our amazing projects 😊. Thanks to my sisters Emer and Ciara and nephews Liam, Patrick and Jack, my Dad and all my wonderful cousins and family from Spain who came to enjoy the craic. Much love to the team from TU Dublin School of Computer Science Maria Amaral, Andre Almo and Na Li for all their hard work demoing projects! A joy to meet my old friends Vicky and Michael and Chris Greegan. Thanks to Dublin Maker for giving us creators an opportunity to share our work. Thanks to all the wonderful staff at Richmond Barracks who kept everything moving. Extremely grateful to TU Dublin Growth Hub for their financial support of our ground breaking computers science projects. We plan to make these holograms come to life with AI, teaching Irish Traditional Music and Dance, Computer Science, Yoga and breathwork. Irish innovation at the cutting edge of technology and culture! Go raibh mile maith agaibh!