COMMENT

Ireland's Dgeneration

``In some EU countries an unprecedented number of Europeans, of an
increasingly young age, are using `synthetic drugs' such as ecstasy, LSD
and amphetamines as part of a youth culture ... the users are not from
marginalised or disadvantaged backgrounds, but are for the most part young
workers or students and relatively welloff.''

THE ABOVE is perhaps the most chilling of the many conclusions to be drawn
from the 1997 report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug
Addiction (EMCDDA). It tells us simply that young people frequently choose
drugs and are not always inevitably plunged into them by a life without
hope or opportunity.

But anyone who has had the horror of drug addiction visited upon themselves
or someone close to them, will testify to how the drug route can just as
easily lead to a life without hope or opportunity. Political leaders and
policy makers across Europe have only slowly been waking up to the need to
pay far more attention to the ``demand side'' of the drug equation.

Clearly, the drug barons we now know so much more about are on one basic
level simply feeding a crude market demand. Efforts to catch these dealers
in death must continue but in the end they will only take us so far.

The EMCDDA is one of the EU's longer acronyms for what is potentially its
most useful body. It was set up in Lisbon in 1994 and this is only its
second annual report. Its main task is to supply member states and EU
institutions with objective and comparable information on drugs and drug
addiction throughout Europe also drawing on data from a wide network of
national centres and other specialised agencies.

>From Ireland's point of view the most eyecatching conclusion is that
almost four out of 10 schoolgoing teenagers admit they have used cannabis.
On the face of things, this appears to be twice the going rate in most
other EU states.

The wide variation may in some ways be explained by differences in survey
questioning, and perhaps also, mitigated by the prospect that much of it
was ``once behind the bicycle shed'' bravado. But it is a remarkable
statistic nonetheless and the study authors note Ireland among a number of
countries where evidence of illegal drug use by school children has
increased.

More important, however, may be what this report does not tell us about the
drug situation in Ireland. There are glaring blanks signalling
nonavailable data for Ireland in several parts of this 144page document,
especially when it comes to the use of synthetic drugs which are proving so
seductive to young people across Europe. This is all the more frustrating
when one considers that almost two million of the country's 3.6 million
people are rated ``at risk'' from drug addiction because of the country's
dramatically young population profile.

This latter factor will also help in part to explain why Ireland has the
youngest drug addicts currently in treatment. Your average Irish addict is
under 24 years old, in fact two thirds of them are under 25; only one in 10
is over 35. Eight out of 10 of them are male and three quarters of them
inject themselves with all the attendant health risks.

Most of the other data tracks how the problem has come to the forefront of
the national consciousness over the last decade. Irish drugrelated deaths
have risen steadily from eight in 1986 to 49 a decade later.

Figures on the drug equation ``supply side'' offer the gardai and customs
some grounds to argue that they have been active over the last decade.
Arrests in Ireland for drug related offences have increased fourfold in
the decade up to 1995 and the amounts of illegal drugs seized also
increased dramatically.

In the case of cannabis it has gone from 43kgs in 1986 to almost 16,000 kgs
in 1995. The quantities of heroin similarly increased threefold while
cocaine seizures were up 200pc though the overall amounts were much smaller
than cannabis.

Cannabis remains the EU's most used drug. In many other countries the more
sinister amphetamines are in second place, generally affecting 3pc of the
adult population. Perhaps significantly, the number of amphetamine seizures
in Ireland continues to increase and in 1995 quantities seized were 15
times the 1987 level.

The report's authors note that efforts to reduce drug demand have been
receiving increasing attention. Across the EU politicians and planners are
debating how to get the mix of prevention measures education, information,
rehabilitation & care right. ``Twin keys to progress are firstly to be
aware of what other nations or regions are doing, and secondly to be able
to compare the effectiveness of their projects and policies,'' the authors
conclude.

CLEARLY Ireland appears to have a data deficit to address. But otherwise,
if it does nothing else this report will remind all of us that drug use and
its attendant perils is no respecter of class or nationality. This truly
universal problem confronts us all.