The Irish Times view on the crack cocaine epidemic: devastating communities

It is the women of west Tallaght who speak most powerfully of the trauma, isolation and despair that comes with crack cocaine. One mother, in her early 40s, told our reporter Kitty Holland: "It's not just addiction. This stuff is worse than heroin. It's worse than any kind of drug that's out there. It's a killer. And you will sell your own grandmother to get this stuff". Another, who had used other drugs since her teens, said: "Crack cocaine has destroyed me in less than five years. I have lost my four beautiful children to it".

An epidemic of crack cocaine use across west Tallaght, home to some of the poorest households in the State, is "devastating" individuals like these women, and their families, according to a report from the Tallaght Drug and Alcohol Task Force. With bleak clarity, it warns crack addiction "will dwarf the heroin epidemic of the '80s" if not urgently addressed. It points to an 18 per cent increase in referrals for crack addiction between 2019 and last year, adding that the number of crack pipes dispensed has risen from 157 in 2018 to almost 4,000 so far this year between its Killinarden and Jobstown crack services.

The impact of crack on users appears to be more rapid and more intense than other addictive drugs, bringing with it a level of chaos not seen among users of, for example, heroin. The impact on already vulnerable women, who are targeted by cynical and ruthless dealers, and on children makes for distressing reading. A third of referrals for crack addiction in Tallaght last year were women.

They are described as “increasingly vulnerable to intimidation and forced behaviours [including] selling themselves to settle debts”. For some, their homes are taken over and used as bases from which to manufacture and sell the drug – known as “cuckooing”. Their children face being removed from them by Tusla. Young people are at risk of being “groomed” into the local drugs economy from as young as 10 years old to hold and sell drugs.

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This is a situation rooted in a recurring cycle of intergenerational poverty, childhood trauma, parental addiction, low resilience and deep despair. It results from a short-sighted policy of neglect and looking the other way by successive governments – whether from failures in housing, education, youth services, mental-health services, welfare-adequacy, community-policing or supports to lone parents.

Local drug services, established in the 1990s to address the heroin crisis, are ill-equipped to respond to the misery promised by crack cocaine. The task force has seen its budget cut in the past decade. It is calling for an urgent funding increase of €1 million. That is a modest ask and a fraction of the long-term cost – human and financial – of continuing to turn a deaf ear.