Sadhbh, a mother of young children in her 30s, once bought cocaine from a friend at a wedding. She accepts this “sounds really grim” but it was not the only wedding she attended where guests took the drug. “The heaviest night I’ve ever done was after the after-party of a wedding – in a hotel room with a crowd of us keeping the party going.”
Describing herself as middle-class, Sadhbh says she takes cocaine occasionally but “wouldn’t consider myself a regular user”. She has also used the drug with her husband.
As the demographic of people taking drugs in Ireland changes, she is among a new generation whose use of cocaine has surged in recent years.
The white powder is a powerful stimulant but it can derail life when usage spins out of control, as it often does. Recent Department of Health data shows cocaine, which is highly addictive, has surpassed opioids such as heroin as the main illicit problem drug reported by people seeking treatment.
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Once seen as a drug of youth, cocaine is also prevalent among an older age cohort.
The median age of people in treatment for cocaine use is 34. They are more likely than before to be in employment and generally have a better level of education than users did in 2017.
Health Research Board (HRB) data point to a 252.6 per cent increase between 2017 and 2024 in the number of people seeking treatment in cases where cocaine was the main problem drug. “The biggest change in treatment demand patterns was due to cocaine,” the HRB said in a report published in May.
“We use the three Es” to describe the cocaine situation, says Anita Harris, deputy head of services at Coolmine, a drug and alcohol treatment group with 14 service centres in Dublin, Limerick, Cork and Co Kerry. “Everyone’s using it. It’s everywhere. And it’s everything.”
Harris notes how the profile of cocaine users seeking Coolmine treatment has evolved over the years.
“These are people that have work histories. They’re not your demographic of early school leavers. They’ve third-level education, trades. It’s a very, very different profile, that literally their lives have been turned upside down,” she says.
“A lot of these [people] now have to even reconsider careers, if there’s a lot of cocaine use in their careers ... Because cocaine use is so widely available [for] many of these now, it’s a complete change. They’ve to now change the way they either are returning to work, or they need to retrain or re-educate themselves in something else. Because they cannot return to that workplace.”
So who are Ireland’s older users of cocaine and what sort of impact is it having on them and their families?
We spoke to several people about their experience, some telling of adverse health impacts such as heart attacks and of selling cars or even work tools to fund their cocaine use. The sister of one user told of the drug being delivered directly to his front door and entertainment events in broad daylight.
SADHBH*
‘The idea of being around the kids with it still in my system does not sit well with me at all’
Sadhbh, which is not her real name, is now 37. She was in her late 20s when she started using cocaine. Living abroad at the time, she tried using the drug for the first time “on a night out with a load of other Irish people”.
“I remember the comedown the next day was pretty hard. I remember being surprised at that,” she says.
“Considering I only did a very reasonable amount, it was a lot for that.” As she describes it, the comedown was similar to “the fear, when you’ve got a really bad hangover”.
That experience put her off cocaine for a time. “It was probably a year, if not more, before I looked at it again,” she says. At this stage, Sadhbh had returned to Ireland. “To my mind ... it had become a lot more widespread.”
As time went on, she used the drug in different settings.
“Sometimes on nights out, depending on who I was with, or where I was ... I never really planned to do it. It was just, ‘Oh, someone’s got a bag. Let’s go to the ladies’, or that sort of thing. In other cases, it was having friends [over], drinking at home. You have a few drinks at home, catching up, and someone would just have a bag on them,” she says.
“I personally would only ever do a few bumps, as they say. I always laugh when you see people on movies doing massive lines of cocaine ... I’ve never in my life done that. I’ve never seen anyone do that.”
Her practice is to use cocaine in very small amounts consistently over the course of several hours.
The last time Sadhbh used the drug was a few months ago when she was away for the night. “The idea of being around the kids with it still in my system does not sit well with me at all.”
There is no getting away from the fact that cocaine is supplied by dangerous criminal networks but she tries not to think about where the drug comes from. “I don’t particularly want to know the details.” Sadhbh goes on to liken this to turning a blind eye to where cheap clothing may come from and the working conditions that may be involved.
“It’s that kind of white privilege. That kind of cognitive dissonance. I don’t think about it,” she says.
“My mum had always told me, even about hash or anything like that ‘You know you’re just funding criminals’. I don’t ask my friend where she gets it. I don’t particularly want to know. The fact that she’s taking it alongside me makes me think that she’s happy enough that it’s okay stuff.”
Harris of Coolmine says this is all part of cocaine being “very socially acceptable”.
“If someone went in and injected heroin, I think people would be shocked to the core. It just would not be acceptable for people to use heroin in the workplace ... or socialising after the workplace. Whereas nobody’s batting an eyelid to people using cocaine – until it becomes a problem.”
“For the majority of people that we see, their story is the same. It all started very recreational.”
Harris says people buying cocaine are “actually adding” to the wreckage of human lives and communities caused by criminal feuds. “It mightn’t be in your area, in Dalkey or Foxrock where they’re having the feuds. But where do you think your cocaine is coming from?”
BEN*
‘My wife thought I was having an affair. I said, no, I’d been using coke every day. She had no idea’
Ben, who is 51 and a father of three, had a disastrous experience with cocaine. When he started using the drug more than 20 years ago, he arrogantly believed he would never have a problem with it.
“Because I used it socially, and it was never something I felt I had to keep up the next morning. But it’s a sneaky drug. It creeps up on you,” he says.
“I was 30 when I first used cocaine. It was very sparingly ... I took it once and then didn’t take it for months. And then slowly, every time you’re going out. It’s just so accessible now.”
“It’s not just a drug for young people. The pubs I drank in, there were 60-year-olds [on the drug]. Cocaine is from grannies down to teenagers.”
Ben says the drug is very easy to source. For those on a night out, the “big thing” to observe is how people behave. “You see people going in and out of the toilet ... You’ll know it’s going on. A thing that’s being said all the time is, ‘Have you got a number?’ That usually means ‘Have you got a number for somebody I can get?’ At this point someone will usually offer a [phone] number.”
Cocaine “really took over” Ben’s life during the Covid pandemic. “I was on the Covid payment, I was at home so, ‘Ah sure, I’ll get a bag’. I’d end up using in the morning. I’d be ... at home painting the house, justifying it: ‘I’m still doing things’.”
Ben felt like he needed the cocaine “to function” in life. “It was every day, and then that evening. The bills were mounting up ... I wasn’t paying bills. I was manipulating my kids to take the post out of the post box so my wife couldn’t find them. The mortgage was going into arrears.”
His wife knew nothing about his cocaine use. “You become a master manipulator,” says Ben. “It came to a head when we were driving one day. I was brought up with good values and morals, and I hated myself.”
Ben’s wife asked him, in the car, if he was having an affair. “I couldn’t wait to get it out of my mouth. I said, ‘No. I’ve been using coke every day’. She had no idea.”
“I became so sneaky and devious, to get what I want, that nothing else mattered,” he says. “She was devastated.”
The marriage broke down. At 49 he moved back in with his parents. He had to explain to his wife that their mortgage was thousands of euro in arrears.
He sought help initially “to curry favour” with his wife, but admits he was still using cocaine on the bus to the treatment centre. Only later did he resolve to accept treatment for himself.
He’s been two years clean of cocaine and has reconciled with his wife. He knows he’s lucky. “I functioned for so long. Worked and used ... I functioned for so long, until it took over everything.”
Harris of Coolmine says cocaine puts users on a “gradual progression” to addiction. “You could use cocaine for a very long time recreationally before it starts moving into problematic cocaine use,” she says.
“When I’m trying to get people to understand why would people use, when they know what the destruction is going to be, I say: ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’
“They don’t see themselves as that other person out there who has a drug problem. They see themselves as a person who’s working, who can afford cocaine, who has a job, who has a family, and I use this because I feel good when I use it. It’s the exact same kind of psychology as somebody going for a drink on a Friday after work.”
Still, risk is never far away. Certain users drive while under the influence of the drug. Others admit to working on building sites after taking cocaine. The health and safety implications were clear but user’s need for the drug was bigger.
Cocaine doesn’t only affect the person using it. Those who love the drug user are also deeply impacted.
MUIREANN*
‘My brother can get it anywhere ... He was at a show in Dublin last year. It was delivered to the matinee at lunchtime’
Muireann’s brother is a 47-year-old tradesman and father in a family with a middle-class background. He started “dabbling” in his late twenties, she says. “The usual, started smoking a bit of weed, then taking a few pills – and then to the cocaine,” she says.
Her brother’s marriage broke down because of his drug-taking. “He’s isolated himself from everybody,” she says. “He can’t be in social situations any more ... He just isolates himself away and stays in bed ... It’s just awful, and there’s nothing we can do.”
Muireann says her brother is still using cocaine, which is delivered to his house. She tells her children, who are too young to understand the situation, that their uncle “is not well”. They “love him, because when he’s okay, he’s great fun”.
Still, Muireann’s husband doesn’t want their children around her brother because of his cocaine habit. “Obviously he [her husband] won’t let them go in the car or anything. He drives high constantly.”
Muireann says her brother can purchase cocaine easily. “He gets it delivered to the house. He can get it delivered anywhere ... He was at a show in Dublin last year. It was delivered to the matinee at lunchtime, at the break,” she says. “No problem. They can get it anywhere. I don’t know how they do it. There’s a world and it’s just a text away.”
Living in the same neighbourhood as her brother, she worries about safety. His car “was smashed up outside the house”, she says.
“He is a normal person. He’s a gent. He’s the most generous human, good-looking fellow, gorgeous, really successful man – and this has just taken every ounce of him from us. He’s not the same. Even if he stopped today, I don’t know would we ever get him back. I think his brain chemistry has changed that much now, he’s gone into psychosis, where he thinks conspiracy theories.”
Feeling helpless, she lives in fear of finding her brother dead. “Nobody can help him until he reaches rock bottom, and I don’t know what that looks like.”
THE MEDIC
‘Cocaine is known as the perfect heart-attack drug’
Increasing cocaine use was reflected in data this week from the Rutland Centre, another drug treatment group. Rutland’s annual report pointed to the increasing complexity of drug addiction with 77 per cent of residential clients presenting with two or more addictions. Cocaine featured heavily.
Doctors see the effects in the emergency room.
“Ask any emergency physician and they will tell you, cocaine-associated chest pains is definitely something we see in Ireland, especially in the 30s and 40s,” says Dr Lisa Cunningham, consultant in emergency medicine at Mayo University Hospital.
She has seen an increase in presentations in this age group over the past 10 years but says some patients won’t tell medics of their drug use. “Some patients may disclose their cocaine use and some may not, even when directly asked. Especially with local hospitals, community, people knowing each other, patients may be reluctant to state it.”
Cunningham says “cocaine is known as the perfect heart-attack drug,” adding that “even recreational use, or chronic cocaine use” has a huge effect on the heart.
“It leads to stiffer blood vessels, which causes high blood pressure in the body. It is known to alter the structure of the muscle of the heart – causing it to enlarge. This can lead to heart failure as the heart can’t pump properly with an enlarged muscle.”
Cocaine use can be associated with the build-up of plaque in the coronary arteries – the arteries supplying the heart muscle – leading to ‘blockage’ heart attacks. “If the electrical stimulant of cocaine is too much on a heart, this can lead to cardiac arrest.”
People in their 30s and 40s may already have “traditional risk factors for heart disease beginning to appear: rising cholesterol, diabetes, sedentary lifestyle, high blood pressure, stress in life.”
Adding cocaine to the equation can be “like an accelerator to a fire,” she says. “Cocaine tips the risk factors over the edge with monumental consequences.
“A common thing patients say to me is that they haven’t had previous bad effects of cocaine, or their friends never had problems.”
Cunningham says cocaine isn’t made in a pharmaceutical laboratory, with healthcare professionals, quality assurance, safety and regulation checks.
“You literally do not know where this comes from in the world, nor do you know the motivation of people behind making it, besides financial gain at the expense of anyone’s life,” she says.
“Every time you take cocaine, there is no regulated ingredient list, no idea what is in it, with no knowledge of what immediate effect it has on your health. That may be chest pain or it may be cardiac arrest. It does not matter if it’s the first time or the fifth time. Every time you take cocaine ... the damage is being done, and there will be one time that potentially the heart will not be able to cope.”
*Names have been changed
