Heroin: The Inconvenient Truth

Over the past week, newspapers have been filled with details of the arrest of Christy Kinahan and his sons and associates. It has been portrayed as a massive bust of a major drugs gang and as such a crucial victory for the police in Spain, Ireland and the UK.

Kinahan is from Dublin and the word is out now that he was behind the export to Ireland, from different parts of the world, of a huge quantity of drugs. He is depicted as having been at the apex of the supply chain, the Mr.Big who ran the show, with links to all of the characters made notorious by the tabloids here over the past ten years, many of whom are now dead. Some newspapers have devoted entire special sections to the operation and its aftermath. The details of the drugs operations have been spelt out and, if you were being cynical, you might say drooled over. Readers, of course, have a natural curiosity about criminals: who they are, how they operate and what they get up to. Whether or not you can believe even half of what you read is a different matter. In the end, for newspapers, it is another form of entertainment. It sells. Why not run with it?
But there is a different sort of story about drugs in Ireland that isn’t being written. That story concerns the reality of heroin addiction on the streets of not just Dublin, which has been a heroin blackspot for decades now, but also of towns all over Ireland. It is not a sexy story. And it will not sell newspapers or magazines in the way that copy that pores over the lavish lifestyles of the criminally rich (or rich criminals) does. But it is far more important than all of those stories put together. We have begun to tell that story in this issue of Hot Press. The hope is that others will now pick up the thread.
For many years, it has been estimated that there are 15,000 heroin addicts in Ireland. However, the truth is that the number is far higher than that today. In other words, the problem is steadily becoming more acute. Will the arrest of Christy Kinahan make any difference to those people who have fallen prey to heroin? In the short term, the gangs may have a bit of difficulty getting drugs through, and the supply may drop. The price of heroin will go up as a result. The effect of this, in turn, will be that addicts will feel that they have to rob more to get the money they need to feed their habits. If anything, therefore, the disruption of the drugs supply-chain is likely to increase the level of crime.
In the medium term, and this will probably be a matter of weeks rather than months, the supply levels will resume again at the normal level. The Gardaí may not say so publicly, but privately they acknowledge that this is how it goes. It doesn’t, it seems, matter how many Crime Bosses you put behind bars. The drugs get through. And there is always someone else queueing up to take on the mantle of the fallen Dons.
So how do you address the issue of widespread heroin addiction, and the appalling effects it has on society, especially in disadvantaged areas? Is there a different approach that might yield better results? No one seems prepared to examine this question with any sort of rigour. We are locked into a model that sees by far the greatest proportion of our resources going into hunting people down and locking them up. Meanwhile, the efforts of health professionals are frustrated at almost every turn. Lip service is paid to helping addicts manage the problem, and frontline activists fight a brave battle, trying to give a shape to the lives of drug users. But the underlying official attitude is that addicts are flotsam, most of them hopeless cases for whom nothing can be done. They haunt the streets of the city like extras in a black farce, an edge of desparation written in their every move. They walk the boardwalk in Dublin or hang out in Aston Quay or on Thomas Street and no one gives a damn about them as long as they don’t start climbing over walls in Foxrock.
Instead of fresh thinking, over the past two years people working in the area of prevention and treatment have had to deal with cuts of up to 25% in the resources available. The testimony of those who are working on the ground in our investigation in this issue is stark. Buildings in which treatment is offered are neglected. Methadone programmes are unavailable locally, so that people have to travel to Dublin or do without. Needle exchange the same. The cost in human terms is colossal.
But the cost in economic terms is arguably even greater. We all know that 80% of crime in Ireland is drug-related. Syringe hold-ups. Armed robbery. Houses broken into. Car windows smashed and anything that moves pilfered. Bags snatched. Mobile phones nicked. Most of this is a direct product of heroin addiction, and the related fact that heroin is an illegal drug. This is where current policies have left us.
There is something seriously wrong with a society that puts chasing small-time users and dealers ahead of helping them. There is something even more seriously wrong with a society that neglects the individuals who are suffering most, the addicts, and their families, who share the terrible burden of their addiction, and instead defines its response primarily in terms of crime and punishment. It is the product of an ideological shift which has taken place here, and in which a huge number of Irish people have been silently (and perhaps unintentionally) complicit. It is the PD-isation of official policy. The party is gone but their monetarist legacy lives on.
Somewhere along the way, during the PD years, the idea of the nation as a mutually supportive community of fellow citizens was lost. Instead of everyone contributing to doing the things that are necessary in a civilised society to support those who are disadvantaged or in trouble, the authorities bought into the idea that everyone should have to pay to clean up their own mess – and with knobs on (or rather with interest added) if possible. It can be summed up in a question, which the proponents of self-centred free marketism always insisted on asking: “Why should I have to pay to help him fix his problem?” And then we had to bail out the banks…
It is, fundamentally, a reprehensible attitude and one that no-one with a genuine feeling for their fellow citizens could ever support. But this is what we have been sucked into. It is official policy. There was a time when people who got into trouble were given a helping hand. Well, not any more.
It is time to go back to the drawing board and to re-examine all of the assumptions about what people term the misuse of drugs. At the very least we need a co-ordinated, national, emergency response to what is happening now with heroin addiction, because if we don’t act sooner rather than later, all of the evidence suggests that the consequences will be horrific. Divert resources from the criminal justice system if necessary. Stop putting people stupidly and unnecessarily behind bars. Put people’s health first. And look again at the way in which the current application of the Misuse of Drugs Act – all the more so since the addition of a whole new range of offences in an attempt to put head shops out of business – actually facilitates the induction of teenagers, especially in disadvantaged working-class communities, into heroin use. And finally, get beyond the tired and useless assumptions and consider properly a model that would allow addicts to use heroin long-term that is clean and free of contaminants.
There is a better way. There has to be. Now
read on…