While Ireland has been preoccupied with one epidemic, another has been quietly taking root. Cocaine use is not a new scourge, but its reach has been widening and with it the scale of the social and health-related problems that follow. What was once stereotyped as a drug of wealthy young professional men is now ubiquitous across age groups, social classes and regions.
That much is clear from a new report from the Health Research Board. It shows that, whereas during the previous peak of cocaine use in 2007 it was concentrated in cities and large towns, today cocaine is as much a rural drug as an urban one. As a garda told this newspaper in 2019, in an article on the rise of cocaine in the northwest, the average consumer is “a farmer or a nurse”.
The report homes in on cocaine’s rising popularity among young women in particular. Irish young adults now have the second highest rate of cocaine use in Europe after the UK, and the sharp increase since 2002/03 appears to be driven by young women. In the five years up to 2020, use of cocaine actually fell among young men, but it more than quadrupled among young women. The number of young people presenting for problem cocaine use increased between 2011 and 2019 from 254 cases to 688.
Those trends are inseparable from broader patterns in the use of drugs and alcohol. While the age at which young people had their first drink rose from 15.6 years in 2002 to 16.6 years in 2019, a staggering 64 per cent of 15-24-year-olds who take alcohol were “hazardous drinkers” and more than a third (38 per cent) had an alcohol-use disorder. Self-reported drunkenness also increased among 16-17-year-olds, especially among girls. The report poses a question: among adolescents, is alcohol being replaced with other drugs such as cocaine?
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The first step in any strategy is the funding of further research that might help to answer such questions. Beyond that, there are three policy dimensions. The first is to tackle supply, a task largely overseen by An Garda Síochána. It continues to make inroads, as evidenced by the recent seizure of over ¤4.7 million worth of cocaine in south Dublin, but the authorities will always be playing catch-up with the criminal gangs that dominate the trade. The crux of the challenge is stemming demand, and here education is critical to steering young people away from cocaine and driving home the reality that this supposedly glamorous drug is the product of a global criminal economy that destroys lives and hollows out communities.
No less important is the work of care and treatment for those who suffer with addiction and misuse. Like any epidemic, unless it is identified early and treated, this one spreads rapidly. Only by treating it as the public-health crisis that it is can the State have a hope of bringing it under control.