The inquests into five cocaine-related deaths at the Dublin coroner's court this week highlight the dangers of a drug many people see as a bit of fun at the weekend, writes Carl O'Brien
The Dublin county coroner isn't a man given to flashy or headline-grabbing public pronouncements. But this week, as he examined the details of five deaths before him, all linked to cocaine use, he felt the need to give the starkest of warnings.
"People need to be very aware of the dangers of cocaine use," Dr Kieran Geraghty said to a packed function room at the Plaza Hotel in Tallaght, where the coroner's court sat on Tuesday. "Today we are going to hear three more cases of cocaine in toxicity . . . Deaths from cocaine are not dose-related . . . You don't have to take much of it. You can die the first time you take it." The grim roll-call of deaths included Laurence Ade Onojobi (20), and Roy Flynn (31), who were found dead on the living room floor of their rented home in Blanchardstown, with cocaine scattered across the floor, last October. Both had died of heart failure caused by cocaine intoxication.
Then there was Gerard Browne (30), who was discovered lying dead on his bedroom floor by his mother last September. As he had gone to bed that evening, he asked his mother to wake him up at 6.30am for work the next day. He died from an overdose of three drugs, including cocaine.
And there was the disturbing story of Karen Power (25) and her boyfriend David Dunne (26), who had been taking cocaine together in their hotel room in the Tara Towers in Booterstown, Dublin, last August. Within 15 minutes, Power was dead. When staff came to help, he pleaded to them: "Please do something - she's my life." She lay on the bed, with a pillow under her head, with saliva foamed up around her mouth. As gardaí arrived at the scene, he jumped to his death from the balcony of the sixth-floor hotel room. She had died suddenly from cocaine intoxication; he was found to have had cocaine in his system at the time of his death.
Despite the stark warnings and shocking details, chances are that the widespread consumption of cocaine in pubs, nightclubs and homes across Ireland will continue unabated this weekend.
There is still, overwhelmingly, a perception that coke - the glamour drug favoured by celebrities - provides a clean hit and is just another part of a night out to keep you going until the early hours of the morning.
There is a blizzard of statistics and indicators, all showing a steep upward curve in cocaine use in recent years across a range of ages, class groups and geographic areas.
Once it was a drug rigidly associated with the entertainment industry and sections of the middle-class. Not any more. Increased availability, lower prices and increased affluence mean it is the drug of choice for many younger people right across the socio-economic divide. Disadvantaged communities, too, have seen a major shift in the last two years, with cocaine beginning to rival heroin as the main problem drug.
"It's clear that all the indicators point to a continued increase in cocaine use, across all social strata," says Dr Des Corrigan, chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Drugs (NACD). "That impact is very much experienced nationwide."
Cocaine used to sell at anything from €150-€200 per gram, but increases in supply (thought to have been driven by Colombian cartels who began to move their attention away from the saturated US market to concentrate on Europe) means it is selling at around €70 per gram these days.
Robin Williams's comment that "cocaine is God's way of telling you that you make too much money" no longer seems to stand.
Public perception, too, seems to have shifted. Its sheer prevalence means it is seen as an increasingly normal and acceptable part of a night out in many social circles. Very quickly, it has travelled from an underground sub-culture into the mainstream.
The true scale of consumption is, by its nature, difficult to quantify, although scientists studying waste-water treatment in Dublin say traces of the drug were contained in 70 per cent of the samples it tested.
Cocaine seizures, an indicator of supply, jumped from 17kg in 2002 to about 270kg in 2006. Cocaine-related offences, such as supply, theft and public order offences, ballooned from 297 in 2002 to 1,224 in 2005. There has been a six-fold increase in the number of cocaine-positive samples detected in post-mortems between 2000 and 2005. The latest survey on the use of the drug here indicates that 5 per cent of people aged 15-34 had taken cocaine at least once. All indications are that cocaine is - as Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny put it last year - "dusting every town, village and suburb in the State".
Cocaine, clearly, can kill. So why aren't people listening? Part of the problem is that the gloom-laden depictions of cocaine as a highly addictive and socially corrupting force simply don't ring true with many users.
The majority of people will use it for fun, as part of the night out, and turn up for work on a Monday morning. It's an efficient and affordable drug that gives a 30-minute high of feeling alert and euphoric, while heightening the user's senses of sight, sound and smell.
Many who do it casually - in modest amounts every now and again - don't experience any significant health or addiction problems. This is a generation which saw the sometimes over-hyped dangers of ecstasy in the 1990s and has come to distrust voices of authority and official fonts of wisdom.
If there is one common sentiment among people who use the drug recreationally, or are involved in social circles where it's common, it's this: it's fun, not entirely harmless, and every once in a while the habit has to be reined in. It's a thin white line that needs to be negotiated carefully.
"It's incredibly common now," says Richard, a 31-year-old teacher based in Cork who describes himself as a "bit of a party animal". "Once it was a novelty; now it's all over the place. The attitude among my friends is that it's a step up from grass, but it's still purely recreational - it's a bit of fun," he says. "It's getting a bit out of hand, though. A lot of the pubs are spraying WD-40 [ a brand of oil lubricant, which causes cocaine to congeal] on the toilets to try to stop it. It's different to the ecstasy scene, which was associated with dance music. This is much more prevalent; it's becoming another part of the night out."
Lia, a 21-year-old student in Limerick, says the attitude among many of her friends is that it's a stimulant that keeps the night alive right through until morning.
"I've never seen it cause any severe problems, but you do see people getting, maybe, too dependent on it," she says. "It still depends on your circle of friends whether you use it. A lot of my friends will produce it at parties or at the pub, but usually it's pre-arranged. One difference now is you begin to see it around a bit more, at mid-week parties, not just at the weekend."
Declan is in his late 30s and works as a lobbyist in Dublin. He's a very occasional user and says that part of reason for the drug's prevalence is that it doesn't have the same "scary connotations" as hard drugs or ecstasy.
"Given the tolerance of alcohol in society, it's not surprising we're more tolerant towards drugs seen as less problematic than others are, like cocaine. It still has the feel of a glamour drug. It does become clear when a friend goes beyond just using it for fun. You see it in their behaviour - it becomes very obvious to everyone, except themselves."
BUT IS A generation of people sleepwalking into cocaine use without being aware of its very real risks? Mairead Lyons, director of the NACD, thinks so.
"I don't think any of the people whose cases were heard by the coroner's court this week knew the risks they were taking," she says. "There needs to be a much greater effort to dispel the myth that cocaine is a clean, safe drug. There is a wide range of physical and psychiatric problems associated with cocaine use, many of which are serious and may even be fatal."
Research shows that cocaine combines with alcohol in the system to form another drug - cocaethylene - which is more toxic than using either drug alone.
Cocaine affects heart rhythms, which can lead to heart attacks. Cardiac complications - a factor common to most of the deaths that before the coroner's court this week - are the most common cause of death among cocaine users. Other complications include chest pain, increased blood pressure, respiratory failure, strokes and seizures.
It is perfectly possible, says assistant state pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster, for a person to take a specific dose of cocaine one day and be fine, and die from exactly the same dose the next day. "The cause of death is not dose-related - [ taking cocaine] is like Russian roulette; a very, very small amount of the drug can kill you," she said at the coroner's court recently.
The number of deaths caused by cocaine is unclear, although the EU's drug-monitoring centre estimates that the drug plays a "determining role" in about 10 per cent of all drug-related deaths.
The negative social and health consequences of rising cocaine use are becoming increasingly apparent in the criminal justice and health systems. Cocaine-related offences, such as supply, theft and public order offences, have jumped upwards, while there has been a 10-fold increase since 1999 in the number of people seeking help from the health services due to cocaine use.
It is also impacting on changing levels and types of crimes, especially within communities with histories of drug problems. "I'm seeing more people getting into trouble with it who don't have a history of offending," says a probation officer working on Dublin's northside. "They're people who are working, but are caught in possession or supplying it at a party or nightclub. Others are done for theft, trying to keep a habit going that's costing them anything up to €300 a day."
Anna Quigley of Citywide, a network of drug-treatment centres in Dublin, says the rise of cocaine is taking a heavy toll on areas of the city with an established history of drug problems. "What's worrying is that, for some of the people heavily involved, they would never have considered getting involved in heroin. They would have looked down on that," she says. "Ultimately, it becomes a community problem when people using it don't have the private resources to pay for it. That shows itself in anti-social behaviour or the intimidation of people in debt because they can't afford their habit."
In tackling cocaine, it's clear that tougher penalties for the distribution and supply of drugs have had little effect. Naive, if well-meaning, "just say no" campaigns are about as long-lasting as a caffeine buzz. Lately, a new front in the anti-drugs campaign has opened, as law-enforcement bodies try to guilt-trip users by highlighting the "morally irresponsible" side of the cocaine industry, including murders and child exploitation. It seems likely this will meet the same fate. Most agree that a public-education campaign about the very clear risks of cocaine needs to be ramped up, dispelling the myth that it is a clean and problem-free drug. As well as this, many campaigners point out that initiatives need to be realistic: they mightn't stop people taking drugs, but they should focus on reducing the most harmful ways of taking cocaine, such as combining it with alcohol.
Treatment services - still overwhelmingly geared towards dealing with heroin - also need to be reformed and remodelled to reflect the new realities on the streets.
But perhaps the most striking way of highlighting the potential dangers of cocaine is through the voices of those who have lost family members to the drug. At her home in Drumcairn Gardens in Tallaght this week, Frances Browne was still coming to terms with the death of her son, Gerard, from an overdose of three drugs, including cocaine. "He never caused me any trouble. He hardly missed a day's work," says Frances.
Last Tuesday, as she sat through the coroner's court as the details of other drug-related deaths unfolded, she felt a growing sense of shock. "I never knew much about cocaine. I'd heard all about celebrities taking it, but not ordinary people," she says. "It's clear that people don't know the dangers of it. People really need to think twice about taking it, not to feel pressurised about taking it. And if you're having problems, to go and get help.
"Gerard was going to get married. He had lots to look forward to - I just think he had a bit of a slip that night. Kids don't think it will happen to them, but it can. I would say to anyone who thinks they have a problem, be it kids or parents, to get help if you need it. Just be aware of the danger you're putting yourself under."