Pharmacies face siege from desperate addicts

DRUG addicts have threatened to “rush the counters” of pharmacies if they become desperate for their methadone fix.

While the Health Service Executive has made emergency arrangements for people on methadone after pharmacists said they would not dispense the synthetic drug, the action has hit an extremely volatile group.

Stephen, a methadone user for about a year, gets methadone from a Dublin pharmacy, although he now lives in Drogheda, Co Louth. His chemist told him last week he would not be affected but when he called in to collect his prescription yesterday he was told it was not being dispensed.

He fears the drug treatment clinics, already dealing with 3,600 former heroin users, will not be able to deal with a further 3,000 who, like him, get their methadone from a chemist.

“I have been on to friends and they say they are going to rush the chemists if they do not get their methadone. Just run behind the counter and take it,” he said.

Stephen said he was afraid he would quickly slip back to being a heroin addict and mugging people on the streets to feed his habit.

“I have my family back again and that would all go,” he said.

He expected to be experiencing severe withdrawal symptoms by this evening and wants to get his dose down to 50ml so he can qualify for rehabilitation.

“I am that willing to come off it. I hate it [heroin] and never want to go back on it again,” he told the Gerry Ryan Show yesterday.

Another caller, Annette, said her son — a heroin addict for nine years — had been off the drug for six weeks. “Heroin nearly destroyed our family,” Annette, a mother of three, said. She tried to kill herself and one of her two daughters suffers from depression.

At one stage her son’s drug habit had him at death’s door: “If the ambulance did not pick him off the side of the road when it did, he would be dead.”

She wished those involved in making methadone available through pharmacists could see what heroin did to her son. “It is soul destroying to watch someone on drugs,” she said.

Annette said she was €15,000 in debt as a result of paying the money her son owed for drugs. “I did not buy him drugs but I had people coming to my door looking for money he owed. I borrowed from the bank so my son could live because you know they [drug dealers] would kill you now for very little money.

“Methadone is a maintenance — it is not a cure.”

Meanwhile, a chronic heroin addict told a judge yesterday he “will be dead in a week” if he is released from custody.

Patrick Higgins, aged 41, with an address at Henry Street, Limerick, made an impassioned plea at Limerick District Court not to be released from prison as he fears he will die from his drug habit.

He told Judge Elizabeth MacGrath that jail was the only place where he couldn’t get heroin and begged her not to let him “back out on the streets”.

In a direct plea to the judge, the defendant — who has 59 previous convictions but none for drugs offences — said he could “barely stand in court” his heroin problem was so bad.

The court heard that Higgins was arrested by gardaí last Monday as part of a continuing operation into the sale and supply of heroin in Limerick city.