It is possible that the cocaine being sold in Ireland has increased in purity, drug treatment experts tell Eithne Donnellan, Health Correspondent
A huge number of factors influence the effect cocaine will have on any one individual taking it, not just the quality of the batch the drug comes from, the director of a Dublin-based drug treatment centre has said.
Tony Geoghegan, director of the Merchants Quay project, said while there was speculation that the recent spate of deaths among young people using cocaine may have been because the drug they used came from a bad batch, there was no evidence of this to date. He said the effect cocaine had on any one person depended on factors such as a person's height and weight, as well as whether or not they had eaten and their tolerance for the drug.
It also depended on the dosage or purity of the drug, and whether or not the cocaine was taken in conjunction with alcohol or other drugs.
"It is possible that perhaps the quality is getting better. That may contribute to issues around overdosing," he said.
"If you go to a pub and buy a drink you know what you are getting. But if you buy drugs on the street the strength of the same amount from one dealer may be seven times that of another," he added.
And he said that while cocaine can be bulked out with a range of substances, from crushed headache tablets to amphetamines, generally dealers would not cut cocaine with something like poison because it would only result in loss of demand for their product.
"The people who are often most vulnerable in terms of overdosing would be the experimenters and that seems to have been the case in Waterford," he said.
Two young men - John Grey (23) and Kevin Doyle (21) died at Waterford Regional Hospital over the past week, having collapsed at a house party in the city. It is thought the two may have eaten damp cocaine.
Mr Geoghegan said that while there had been three deaths of young people in the past fortnight linked to cocaine use, it was too early to say if this constituted a trend.
"Cocaine use has increased hugely, but notwithstanding that we still haven't seen huge numbers of deaths," he added.
There were more heroin-related deaths than ones associated with cocaine, he said.
Senior Garda sources have also said it is "highly unlikely" a contaminated or very pure batch of cocaine was to blame for any of the recent incidents. "In some of these cases alcohol was a factor as well as cocaine," one garda said.
Dr Brion Sweeney, clinical director of HSE addiction services in north Dublin and a consultant psychiatrist in substance misuse at the Mater hospital, said the HSE had no report of a contaminated batch of cocaine being responsible for recent deaths. "But we warn people that is something that could be happening and we don't know."
He said cocaine could cause a heart attack or stroke or a heart rhythm disturbance. And combined with alcohol it can exacerbate these. He said anyone under the age of 50 presenting at the Mater with chest pain is now routinely checked for cocaine. "In routine clinical care in the hospital we are seeing vascular, cardiac and brain damage from cocaine misuse on an ongoing basis over the last five years . . . it's not a sudden event."