There has been a “significant increase” in the rates of young females taking cocaine which is a “concern”, the HSE’s national clinical lead for addiction services has told the Citizens’ Assembly on Sunday.
Prof Eamon Keenan said the country’s rates of cocaine use are increasing across all age groups and that the drug monitoring programme, seen at last year’s Electric Picnic, will be rolled out at three festivals this year.
Mr Keenan said there has been a “tripling” in the number of people presenting for cocaine treatment in the last six years and that 34 per cent of those were employed.
He said there was a lot of cocaine use and cocaine related deaths during the Celtic Tiger period, which had subsequently dropped off, but was now “increasing up again”.
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“From an Irish point of view, our rates of cocaine use are increasing across all age groups, 2.3 per cent in 2019, up from 1.1 per cent,” Mr Keenan said.
“We’ve seen a significant increase in females, in young females, and that’s a concern for us and that’s to be identified and crack cocaine has emerged as a problem in disadvantaged communities.”
The Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use held its inaugural meeting this weekend in Malahide, north Dublin, where chairman Paul Reid and 99 randomly selected members heard from a wide range of national and international speakers on issues surrounding drugs use and drugs policy.
Justin Kelly, Assistant Commissioner for Organised & Serious Crime, said An Garda Síochána had concerns around the legalisation of controlled drugs and its impact on wider society.
“No other country in the world has fully legalised controlled drugs possession. It’s important to note that Ireland represents 0.67 per cent of the EU population,” he said.
“An obvious risk if we were to do this would be drugs tourism to our country and all that would bring with it.”
Mr Kelly pointed out that Ireland had a border with the United Kingdom and that any situation whereby there was a different regime across the two regions would lead to “significant policing problems”.
“We already see that at the Border around fuel smuggling and cigarette smuggling,” he added.
“We know from colleagues elsewhere abroad that decriminalisation of cannabis can have negative effects on policing, with increases in crime and a normalisation of drug use.
“Generally, colleagues abroad have told us of the increased open use of drugs in public parks and on public transport and an increase in drunk driving.”
Ben Ryan, Head of Policy for Criminal Justice at the Department of Justice, said if decriminalisation was introduced for a certain quantity or amount of drugs, organised criminal gangs would adapt.
“Dealers would then carry just under that amount [of drugs], they would use more vulnerable people, exploit them to be the dealers for them and we saw this in various other policy changes that we made,” he said.
“For example, the mandatory minimum sentences for possession of drugs, the senior dealers used to bring the drugs through themselves because they didn’t trust anyone else to do it.
“Then when we brought in the mandatory sentences. They got vulnerable people, people with addiction issues to bring through the drugs for them and they didn’t care if they got caught, they were expendable.”
Mr Ryan added that the power to search individuals would also be diminished.
“If the guards are concerned that there is dealing going on in a particular area, they would have to only search people that they were very confident were involved in possession with intent to supply, so that would make it more difficult. It would effectively be legalisation in an Irish context,” he said.
Siobhan McArdle, assistant secretary at the Department of Health said it is estimated that there is societal impact or cost of drug use equivalent to €650 million, which includes costs to hospitals, prison, the criminal justice system as well as productivity losses associated with drug use.
Ms McArdle said in 2021 there were 4,206 new presentations for drug treatment, up from 3,802 in the previous year. She said drug induced deaths were stable since 2011 but there had been a slight increase of about 4 per cent in that period.
