Cocaine use: ‘You’d have it for a night out, like the way people have a few cigarettes’

During lockdown, as bars and clubs remained closed, people in their late teens “would be doing coke just sitting on a park bench in Sandycove”, says Jane (20) from south county Dublin.

“Or a few people going to a house for a gathering, they’d be, ‘Does anyone want to get a bag? People call it ‘bag’. They’d say: ‘Does anyone want to split some bag?’ There are people who don’t take it but everyone I know, my age, has. Everyone has at least once. You’d have it for a night out, like the way people have a few cigarettes.”

[ Cocaine abuse ‘on upward trajectory’, say doctors ]

[ Cocaine use on the rise in Munster with profile of user ‘getting much younger’ ]

Jane (not her real name) is speaking after the publication of a report from the Health Research Board that found people aged 15-24 were drinking less but taking significantly more cocaine. The number presenting for problem cocaine use increased 171 per cent between 2011 and 2019, from 254 cases to 688, it says.

Her friend Sarah (21) agrees cocaine is “very common and easy to get”. She uses it when out “in raves and clubs. Security do check your bags but it’s still pretty easy to get in. People go to the bathroom and take it there. That’s what I do anyway.”

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Sarah (not her real name) gets cocaine “from other people” and has “a dealer whose number I got off my friends”. At about €100 per gramme — enough for two or three people — “it is expensive but people don’t care. They think it’s worth the money.”

Jane says dealers have Snapchat accounts, with fake names. “So everyone just adds their dealer’s name on their Snapchat. You just text them to meet up. It’s easy for them to stay anonymous on Snapchat.

“I think they charge extra for home deliveries. I know people that just do drug-drops around the place and everyone gets their drugs from them. Like everyone knows everyone in south Dublin, from social media.”

‘More chatty’

Asked why she takes cocaine, Sarah says: “If people around you are doing it, and you’ve done it before, you just do. It gives you energy, you’re more chatty and it just gives you a buzz.” Neither woman sees the drug as dangerous, particularly if they are among friends in Dublin, though Sarah recounts a “scare” last summer in Spain.

“We took something off someone we didn’t know. It was just such a bad decision. Foreign drugs, any drugs abroad, you don’t know what they’re laced with.

“The next morning I just felt awful. My heart was beating. I was roasting and I was getting sick. I decided to get an Uber to a hospital and then, as I was walking, I couldn’t get in the Uber. I was sitting down and crying and people came and were just, ‘We have to get her an ambulance’. I was just sweating and was not okay,” she says.

“They put me on drips and took bloods, told me to go to a psychiatrist. When I got home I went to my GP to get checked out, I was so scared.”

Across the city, in Ballyfermot, youth and family support centre Famlibase referred five young people for residential treatment, for cocaine and benzodiazepam use, last year. That was more than the previous 10 years combined, says youth and community worker Brendan Cummins.

He says it is too late to reverse the “normalisation” of cocaine use among the under-25s, and notes for most its use does not become problematic. There is “no fear” around taking it and it’s “accessible everywhere”, he says.

“It’s not a rich person’s drug any more. Along with weed and cannabis, cocaine is seen as the same as drinking.

“So I think we need to recognise it is there and it isn’t going to be a problem for most young people. Yes, it is illegal and how it gets into the country is the justice piece. But the people using it shouldn’t be demonised. We need to support the ones who do become dependent on it. That means treatment beds and investing in services.”