Cannabis users spiked with heroin while dealers offer free cocaine to expand their market
Young cannabis users are being offered free samples of cocaine. File picture: Danny Lawson
Young cannabis users are being spiked with heroin and pushed to take cocaine by dealers intent on hooking them to expand their market.
Children as young as 13 are being offered free cocaine samples by dealers when they buy cannabis, according to addiction therapist Michael Guerin.
As the cocaine high is short and the drug is expensive, users can quickly end up in debt and be forced to become mules, carrying large quantities of drugs for organised crime to pay back debt.
David Lane of the HSE’s Drug and Alcohol Taskforce in Cork and Kerry, has also warned of cannabis being laced with potent synthetics and said that is currently a bigger concern than other forms of spiking.
“We have seen synthetic substances adulterating other drugs," Mr Lane said.
“There has been a big change regarding nitazenes [highly potent synthetic opioids] and synthetic drugs, and that is where a lot of our concern is still. They can be more potent and are therefore more likely to cause overdoses."
Heroin use has been decreasing amongst younger age cohorts and new users in Ireland.
But many heroin users who sell small quantities of the drug to fund their own habit, have begun ‘pushing’ it on new users or spiking cannabis with heroin for unsuspecting smokers to hook them and thereby expand their client base.
“The heroin user, because they are so addicted, are under pressure to create new business to sustain their own habit,” Mr Guerin said.
“They’re spiking cannabis users with it to try to get them hooked so that they've got people to sell it to. And they’re encouraging them to try cocaine.
"The rationale behind it is to entrap them more.
“Any serious drug addict, irrespective of what they're taking, unless they have a pocket full of money, which is unusual, are involved in the sale and distribution of drugs purely for economic reasons. They have to be."
He said cannabis users as young as 13 and 14 have told him they have been given free samples of cocaine to try.
"They’re offered to sniff it off the end of a key," he said.
"They would try it and if they started to use it to any degree whatsoever they couldn't afford to pay for it, because cocaine is an expensive pastime. They then became involved in underage moving, distributing, delivering, collecting money all that stuff."
He said it is not unusual for cocaine users to say their habit is costing them between €1,000 and €1,500 a week.
Heroin dealers are also pushing the drug on cocaine users and crack cocaine users to medicate the cocaine ‘come-down’, Mr Guerin said.
A robust drugs strategy is now vital to tackle the growing drug problem, he said.
“We're going to have a new government in a month's time. The last government failed to publish a national drug strategy in spite of the fact that we had a citizens’ assembly.
“It needs to be an absolute priority to come up with a workable strategy that's going to deliver results in terms of a public awareness campaign around cocaine and in terms of trying to prevent these young people who are underage going down the wrong road.
"We have, as a nation, walked blindly onto a land mine where this is concerned."
Harder drugs like heroin are already being used in provincial towns and villages across the country, even in the remote west coast idylls of Castletownbere and Glengarriff.
“Most towns in Co Cork now have some heroin users,” a Garda source said.
“The internet has made the world a much smaller place.
“You can now buy any drug online and learn how to use it online.
"You can be in the most rural place in west Kerry and be onto someone in LA, someone in London, and you’re all cooking up the same cocaine.”
