One of the rarely discussed side-effects of the State's recent increase in economic wealth has been a rising interest in recreational drugs. Demand for cocaine, in particular, has grown in the recent past.
Demand for the commonly available drugs such as cannabis and heroin also remains consistently high.
Despite the panoply of anti-drugs legislation and structures, and the successes of Garda and Customs officers in seizing drugs and making arrests, gardai point out that there are still plenty of young men and women prepared to take risks because of the vast profits involved.
Patrick Murray and Darren Carey, the two young men who were found in the Grand Canal near Newcastle, Co Dublin, had been involved with Ballyfermot-based drugs dealers. But they are believed to have become involved only recently in drug trafficking at a serious level.
Mr Murray was arrested with another young man as he arrived from Amsterdam with a half-kilo of heroin, worth perhaps £30,000 at street prices.
It is suspected that they had been seriously in debt to the gang, which is not wealthy and could ill afford the loss of the consignment. It appears the gang decided to kill the two youths over the debt.
There have been six or seven such killings in the State over the past year, in what appears to be a trend back towards the higher level of drugs-related violence of the mid-1990s.
Between 1994 and May 1996, when members of one drugs gang murdered journalist Veronica Guerin, there were more than a dozen drugs-related assassinations in Dublin.
That spate of killings coincided with the emergence of two or three major drug-dealing gangs in the city. In that period violence increased in parallel with the growth in the quantity of drugs flowing into the city.
After Ms Guerin's murder, the Garda moved against the gang which was responsible for her killing and completely wiped it out. In the wake of this major investigation, several other drug dealing gangs were trapped in the Garda net.
The criminal assets legislation also forced all of the city's major drug dealers to flee the State.
Dublin gardai say that the city is now experiencing the emergence of several new gangs seeking entry into the drugs market on a large scale. Some of these gangs were responsible for the spate of armed robberies over the past year, seeking cash to finance their drug trafficking.
The Ballyfermot gang which is suspected of being involved in the murders of the two youths at the Grand Canal is led by a man in his 20s who is a second-generation criminal. His father was well known to gardai in the west of the city as a robber and associate of another local criminal family which worked closely with Martin Cahill.
It is believed that this man's son has built up his own local drugs network and may have recruited the two young men who were murdered at the Grand Canal.
It is also thought possible that both father and son were involved in the drugs enterprise that fell through when Customs officers seized the heroin at Dublin Airport on December 3rd last. Both the father and son are said to be extremely violent.
One senior garda pointed out yesterday that lives can be lost for relatively small sums of money.
Three weeks ago Joseph Vickers, a small-time drug dealer who appeared to be trying to escape from his background, was attacked and beaten to death at the caravan where he lived in Greystones, Co Wicklow. The gang which attacked him was motivated by the loss of drugs worth only a few thousand pounds at street prices.
In November Martin Nolan, a 34-year-old Waterford man, was abducted and also beaten to death at Ballygarron Wood near the regional airport. He was due to appear in court the day after he disappeared, on charges of possessing ecstasy.
He, too, had fallen foul of a gang of small-time drug dealers over a debt of only a few thousand pounds worth of cannabis. His body has not been found.
On October 6th a drugs gang led by members of a criminal family from Walkinstown in west Dublin were involved in a fracas with members of the splinter republican group, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), during which one INLA member, Patrick Campbell from Belfast, died from injuries inflicted with a machete.
Gardai believe that the INLA is still intent on avenging Campbell's death and fear there could be further deaths or injuries arising from this incident.
During the investigation of the Campbell murder, gardai discovered that the INLA had been taking protection money from drug dealers in Dublin. They discovered a memo from Dublin INLA members to the organisation's leadership in Belfast detailing payments described as donations from "businessmen".
The list of names proved useful to detectives investigating drugs networks in the city.
A north Dublin drugs dealer, Pascal Boland, was shot dead at his home in January last year. A rifle, four shotguns and a pistol belonging to the gang that shot him were recovered by gardai in November.
Another murder in the city tied directly to a drugs debt was that of Thomas Reilly, who was shot dead at his workplace at Premier Dairies in Rathfarnham in March. He too owed a relatively small amount of money to a Tallaght drug dealer, and may have been killed by a professional assassin hired by the dealer.
Outside Dublin, gardai report that drugs abuse is continuing at quite high levels.
Gardai in Galway reported last month that since the assignment of an additional 10 officers to the local drugs unit, some 60 suppliers in the city had been arrested. This marks a 400 per cent increase on the previous year in the amount of drugs seized.
Gardai in Cork and Limerick have also had considerable success against quite major drugs dealers operating in both cities. Yet local gardai report that drugs are still available in quite large amounts, although not on the scale encountered in the mid-1990s.
One of the most depressing aspects of the drugs trade, particularly in Dublin, is the use of heroin by teenagers. A report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, published in November, confirmed a trend noticed by gardai over recent years.
Young people in socially disadvantaged areas of Dublin are twice as likely to have tried heroin as their counterparts in other European cities. A sample of 16-year-olds across Europe showed that in Ireland some 2 per cent had taken heroin, compared with an EU average of 1 per cent.
The new young dealers will almost certainly be looking to these teenage heroin addicts as a primary source of income.