Cocaine nation: crossing the white line

Cocaine users are caught in an international enterprise that’s fuelled by greed, ruled by fear and which regards murder as a means of quality control, writes Caroline O’Doherty

A HYSTERICAL father leaps to his death from a hotel balcony.

A poor farmer runs with the devil to feed his family.

A young plumber is blasted by a gunman on a house call.

An office worker slips out to the toilet of a late night bar and struts her way back like Paris Hilton.

And in a secluded mansion surrounded by security cameras and guns, a self-made millionaire sits back and laughs at them all.

Cocaine affords you that luxury — so long as you’re on the controlling end. For everyone else who crosses the white line, by accident or intention, it is like catching the tripwire on a snare.

You’re caught in an international enterprise that’s fuelled by greed, ruled by fear and which regards murder as a means of quality control.

Cocaine has, literally and figuratively, got away with murder in Ireland for a long time. The status drug of the early ‘90s, it was way more sophisticated than ecstasy. E made you giddy and soft, coke made you ice cool and super confident.

It suited the changing Ireland of the decade that followed. The work hard, play hard set thrived on the adrenaline of wealth and success and whenever that got dull, the high intensity rush of cocaine was a good substitute.

They wouldn’t dream of using heroin. Heroin was a hangover from the gloomy grey ‘80s. It came from dirty stairwells in squalid flat complexes, and involved needles and tourniquets, paraphernalia you didn’t want to be carrying around in your filofax. It made your skin break out and your teeth rot. It made you dreamy and peaceful when you wanted to be edgy and exciting.

Ok, so cocaine got Ben Dunne in a lot of trouble but he was in a penthouse suite in a luxury hotel amid the palm fronds of Florida at the time. How bad?

How bad it can be was shockingly clear in a coroners court this week which dealt with five cases of cocaine-related deaths in one day, each one more tragic and wasteful than the last.

Gerard Browne was 30, lived with his mother, had a girlfriend and held down a job. When his mum called him as usual at 6am one morning last September, she found his cold lifeless body slumped on his bedroom floor.

He’d mixed cocaine with methadone and died without disturbing the silence of the sleeping house.

Roy Flynn, 31, and Laurence Ade Onojobi, 20, didn’t live long enough to enjoy the high from the cocaine they snorted one afternoon last October.

Laurence’s housemate came home to find him staggering around the sitting room, agitated and not making sense.

Roy was already dead, lying on the floor beside him, and a trail of white powder was evident. In the minutes before the ambulance crew arrived, Laurence’s heart also failed.

David Dunne, 26, and Karen Power, 25, had a cocaine breakfast in their sixth floor hotel room after a wedding last August. Within 15 minutes, Karen was dead of heart failure and David, distraught and unable to be calmed, climbed onto the window ledge and jumped out. They behind left their first child, a six-week-old baby.

Coroners are generally an unshockable breed but Dr Kieran Geraghty was moved to comment. “Cocaine can be fatal in very small doses,” he warned. You don’t have to take very much of it and it can cause death the first time you use it.”

Death from heart failure is a long way from a rotten septum which, thanks to actress Daniella Westbrook, we thought was the worst that cocaine could do.

Actually, cocaine can do worse than accidental death — it also does a proficient job at deliberate killing. It used to have snob value but now it’s cheap and readily available and disadvantaged communities once ravaged by heroin are now savaged by cocaine.

Savaged is the correct word, according to those battling the scourge at ground level, because the level of violence associated with cocaine far surpasses that ever seen with heroin.

The upsurge in gangland killing stems from cocaine wars with the added deadly ingredient that many of the dealers are also addicts. Revved up and fearless, they have carried out assassinations outside a garda station, used machine guns in a drive-by shooting on the M50 motorway and murdered in daylight in Clontarf.

Twenty-year-old apprentice plumber, Anthony Campbell, was murdered because he might have witnessed the execution of dealer, Marlo Hyland. He was one of the ordinary innocents who got in the way just like the mums, brothers, girlfriends and children who are terrorised by loved ones with addictions.

That’s just the violence we know of close to home. Half-way across the world in countries like Colombia, small farmers are forced to fend off poverty, and gun-toting drugs bosses, by growing cocoa for the cocaine trade.

Cocoa leaves pay more than coffee beans and who can expect a helpless farmer to tell a drug dealer that he’d much rather grow Fairtrade for the cafés of Cork and Dublin than implicate himself in the illegal drugs market?

He doesn’t know his produce killed five people whose deaths were probed in a coroner’s court in Ireland this week — he only knows his life depends on it.

It’s Saturday and the fast-talking guys with the edgy air and the girls convinced they’re celebrities, will be out tonight, snorting cocaine, bristling with energy, feeling invisible, acting like they own the world.

Gerard Browne, Roy Flynn, Laurence Ade Onojobi, David Dunne and Karen Power briefly felt that way too.