Middle-class drug users need to realise they are a dealers’ “ideal customer”, doctors attending the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) conference in Killarney has heard.
Eddie Mullins, chief executive of Merchants Quay Ireland, the addiction support charity, who spent 32 years with the Irish Prison Service, said people buying drugs needed to remember it was illegal and that by doing so they were becoming a part of the wider “structure of the drugs trade”.
“They don’t like to think that but when I chaired the North Inner City Safety Partnership, part of our remit was to try and engage people who we were not engaged with and so we spoke to people who sold drugs,” he said.
“And what they will tell you is that their ideal customer is a middle-class professional person who will pay a little bit more for the drugs, will always have the cash and will pay to keep their anonymity.
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“Drug dealers don’t want to break somebody’s legs for €100, they will do it but they prefer a clean transaction and they get a clean transaction from people who use drugs recreationally at the weekends then get up and go to work.”
Mullins said many of those same people would look down on those who were drug dependent but who were actually sick.
“People from all professions and all walks of life take drugs and they don’t see the connection.”
Among others, who did not use drugs but were judgmental of those who did, “we often see that attitudes change when drug use comes into their lives” through a family member.
Dr Niamh O’Brien, a Galway based GP who also works with the Health Service Executive’s West Drug Service, highlighted the issues she encountered in the course of her work with illegal drugs but also with prescription medication and over-the-counter painkillers.
The birth of her second daughter with osteogenesis imperfecta type three – a condition of severely brittle bones – and the way her family’s “life and world shifted a little on its axis” had helped her in her work with addiction services.
“I’ve said this many times to my patients, that ‘You know, I could be sitting there where you are and you could be sitting where I am. It’s just twists of fate ... opportunity, privilege or the lack thereof that results in us being in one chair versus the other.’”
O’Brien said it was commonly family members of drug users who came looking for help and cited a recent case in which a sibling had been prompted to approach her by the arrival of “heavies” seeking money.
“It’s often mothers worried about their children. And I get loads of questions about THC [tetrahydrocannabinol, the active psychoactive substance in cannabis] vapes,” she said. “I’ve had people come up to me, colleagues come up to me after talks like this and say ‘I need your help, I’ve just discovered my son is doing this or that’, and it’s awful.
“When there’s education and financial advantage, stuff can be fixed and hidden but the reality of horrible debt and intimidation can happen to anyone.”
Det Chief Supt Séamus Boland, head of the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau, said those who took drugs at the weekend then picked up the paper on a Monday to read about a gangland shooting “couldn’t walk away” from the issue.
“The best analysis that’s out there,” he said, suggests, “there’s still the 80 per cent of the population [that] don’t use drugs. We’ve got to work to increase that number.”
