FACING THE HEROIN PLAGUE

Let's talk about heroin addicts. Yeah, they're the ones who ghost around
town looking like death warmed up. Glazed eyes, sunken cheeks, rotting
teeth. Hopeless cases most of them, good for nothing except bag-snatching.
They rob, they cheat, they lie. And when they've done with that, they rob,
they cheat and they lie again. They steal off their mothers. They steal off
their lovers. And they steal off their children. If there's something that
can be hocked, they'll hock it. If there's something that can be moved,
they'll lift it. And to get their own drugs, they'll buy what the proceeds
of their latest house-breaking job can drum up for them, slice a bit off
the top for their own use, stamp all over the rest with baking powder or
talc, and sell the fucked-up adulterated shit they're left with to the
children next door. Useless, treacherous, dangerous, screwed-up, shameless,
selfish, fucking parasites. Junkies.

That's what most people think. Which is why, in the normal course of
things, virtually no one seems to give a shit about them. There's a core of
people, community activists and volunteers in the treatment centres that
deal with drug use and abuse, who are run ragged, working themselves to the
bone trying to help heroin addicts to put some kind of shape on their
lives, in the long-term hope that maybe, just maybe, they might be able to
beat their addiction. But the State doesn't care. The State has never
cared. And it has never cared because the people don't care.

In fact it goes deeper than that. Heroin addicts are, by definition,
criminals, involved in a criminal way of life. They buy - and if they can
at all, they sell -what is a Class A narcotic. Their addiction sucks them
into a criminal netherworld, in which anything goes and violence prevails.
Most junkies start out as nice people but you don't pay for a heroin habit
on social welfare, so to fund their use of the drug, they become involved
in one form of criminal activity or another. It's not easy to stay nice,
once you go down that road. So they live, they die. Their families hurt but
in the bigger picture no one even blinks. For thirty years, the Government,
the Department of Justice and the Gardai have played out the same old
useless charade of chasing drug dealers around and dumping junkies in jail
for collateral misdemeanours, all to no avail. There are 13,000 heroin
addicts in Dublin. If anything there are more now than there were ten years
ago. It's a fucking mess. And still no one cares, because we're talking
here about marginal people from the most underprivileged ghettos in the
country. We're talking about people at the butt-end of the butt-end. We're
talking about people for whom the Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue,
wants to build more prison places. We're talking about people that the
prim, law-abiding citizens of the country want to see locked up. And if the
key was thrown away, they wouldn't mind either.

Another dead junkie. In the normal course of things, it's so what?

But eight heroin addicts have died in Dublin over the past few weeks.
Within Scotland, over a similar time-frame, more than double that number
have perished. Many of the fatalities have been the result of a bizarre new
heroin-related disease, which attacks the central nervous system. As yet
the cause of this mini-epidemic has not been identified but there is a
substantial probability that it is a result of supplies that were contaminated.

Suddenly there is concern. Presented with what seems, in the short term at
least, to be a medical mystery, the authori-ties have been making noise,
setting up helplines and generally ringing alarm bells.

I hope that the Minister for Health Micheal Martin, and the Minister for
Justice John O'Donoghue, and the Minister for Drugs (or whatever his title
is) Eoin Ryan don't mind my asking: what is the Government's real concern
at this juncture? There is a localised crisis to quell, and it is important
to do that as a matter of urgency. But sticking a band-aid over this
immediate wound will achieve little or nothing, if the festering sore of
illegality and addiction is allowed to remain untreated all over the corpus
of the city.

Instead, why not use this opportunity to take a fresh approach to
confronting the problem of widespread addiction, and the entire stew of
complications that arise from it. And when I say fresh, I also mean
radical. Merely engaging in more of the same old tinkering is no use. You
catch a dealer, another one pops up. You sling an addict in jail, they get
junk there anyway. You try to reason with them or plead with them or
educate them, and the sad fact is that, with the very odd exception, they
don't give a good Goddam. Where's the next fix coming from? That's what
matters.

So here's what you do. We've been saying it for a long time in HOT PRESS,
but it is worth saying again. You tell them where the next fix is coming
from, and that they won't need to rob, steal, lie, cheat or otherwise
engage in criminal behaviour to get it. Because, you tell them, it's
coming, on prescription, from a pharmacy, a doctor or a clinic near you.
You legalise and control it.

Heroin can be produced at a fraction of the cost of methadone. It can be
rendered pure, clean, safe and reliable in the process. And used under
medical supervision, it is far less harmful than cigarettes. Maybe even
than alcohol. With a habit that's managed properly, you can have a long,
stable and productive life that's scarcely more disrupted by the condition
of heroin addiction than a diabetic is by his or her need for attention.

By satisfying the demand for heroin, you cut the dealer out of the
equation. Plus, you potentially bring 13,000 addicts back from the
netherworld which they now inhabit, into the realm of stability, legality
and, in a lot of cases, maybe even work, health and happiness.

So I have this to say to John O'Donoghue, to Eoin Ryan and to the officials
responsible for framing our policy on drugs: if you care enough about
Dublin's 13,000 addicts, this is what you will do. But do you care enough?
That is the real question.

Because if you did, you would make heroin available on prescription.