Globalisation brings world of hard drugs to sheltered towns

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Sometime during the confusion of my teenage years when I was going through a slightly rebellious streak I arrived back home hours after my stay-out time to be met by my father standing on the landing as I came up the stairs.

A heated interrogation followed during which he asked me was I smoking “reefers”. There was a pause. I didn’t know what the word meant.

Later on, I looked it up in the dictionary to find it was a rather quaint expression for a cannabis joint, or a spliff.

I put it all down at the time to how square and old-fashioned he was. But, truth be told, when it came to recreational drugs, I probably knew even less than my father.

Sure there were some soft drugs around and I’m sure I had been offered some by that stage. In reality, the only drugs my friends and I had regular recourse to were the old reliables, alcohol and tobacco.

Actually, I knew more about heroin than I knew about hash at the time. At that stage I was an obsessive reader of Magill magazine and no publication investigated the heroin epidemic in Dublin better.

There were amazing articles about drug marches to force out pushers, the criminals (the Dunne family) who controlled the market in Dublin, and the way in which communities had been ravaged by the drug.

I can still remember the headline on one major piece that was done. They used the title of the Neil Young song: “The Needle and the Damage Done”.

But in Galway in the 1980s that was as remote as the far side of Jupiter. If there were heroin users in Galway, they were few and far between.

Even when I began working as a reporter in The Connacht Tribune, the street drugs remained marijuana and Class As like amphetamines and Ecstasy. There might well have been a handful of heroin users but, if there were, their existence was not really known.

Now, hard drugs are as pervasive and available, if you really want them, as any other consumer product, like a smart phone or, indeed, Smarties.

Last month, I read with some alarm a report about the death of a young heroin addict. He came from Clonmel and lived there. He was found in an abandoned hotel where other addicts flopped out.

In the same week, I listened to a radio report where another bunch of homeless people – some of them addicts – were camping in an old warehouse on the outskirts of Limerick.

The point is it’s everywhere now. A cursory look at the Connacht Tribune’s archives brings up dozens of cases in recent years, involving supply, possession and hopeless addiction.

Anyone who knows anything about heroin will be aware of its ripple effects. There are the dealers and the debt enforcers and the violence.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.