CHILDREN as young as eight years are starting to use drugs as experts warn of a dangerous trend of younger addicts showing signs of increasingly more violent behaviour.

For years the drug scourge was seen as just a Dublin problem, but it has since spread throughout the country.

TWENTY young people have been referred to an adolescent treatment centre in Cork after using legal highs – including a 15-year-old boy addicted to the controversial compound mephedrone.

ALMOST three out of five young people attending one of the south’s largest addiction services are using heroin, compared to almost none three years ago.