Take a walk down Townsend Street in the south city centre of Dublin and stand under the railway bridge and you will be approached by persons seeking to buy or sell drugs. When I stood there recently, I was approached instantly by a man, mid-thirties, who stood chest-to-chest with me and asked “Have you Lyrica?” When I said no he asked “What have you got?” I explained I was not there drug-dealing but making an audio podcast. The man immediately spoke to me about himself with the candour that I find characteristic of drug addicts, and that I still marvel at even after decades of broadcast work talking to them.
The man needed his drug right now to ease his sickness He had 60 Euro in his pocket and would keep asking anyone who turned up until he got the drug he wanted. We were joined by other addicts. The trade was in drugs called D10s and and D5s, they told me, and many other drugs with complex names I found hard to catch which, like Lyrica, are legally prescribed for bona fide medical use but are being illegally traded here on the street. Then there is heroin and crack cocaine. A man showed me the pebble-sized “rocks” of crack that he had cooked up that morning from cocaine powder for sale at a profit that day.
But the most ubiquitous drug of all you will see being traded here is “juice”, that is, methadone, which is being dispensed from the National Drug Treatment Centre up the laneway, which in turn is what attracts the addicts to that location on Townsend Street. “Have you juice?” a man asks of a woman as she comes down the laneway having just exited the clinic carrying a paper bag. She gets him to wait as she takes a bottle from the bag, scratches her name off the label and sells it to him for 20 Euro. She explains to me that she will have enough methadone left over to sustain her, while also getting the money to pay for her true addiction which is alcohol.
I walked up the laneway and was passing the secure steel doors of the drug clinic just as a middle-aged woman exited with her bag of methadone. She recognised me and introduced herself as Anne. She gave me a hug and reminded me that she was one of the people I had interviewed for a television programme I made about 25 years back one night by the Grand Canal on Dublin’s Baggot Street where she was, as she said, “on the game” i.e. earning money through prostitution. So where now was the man I interviewed her with that night, the one she was living with in a tent pitched on the canal bank? Anne told me her partner of over twenty years had since died. I was sad, but not surprised, to hear of his death. One is never surprised to hear of a drug addict’s death. Every junkie’s like a setting sun, as Neil Young sang a long time ago.
It was good to see Anne again and to find that she, at least, was still alive. She was clearly still on methadone but, she told me, she had kicked her heroin habit some years back. And what about being on the game? That was also in her past, she told me, as street prostitution is now a thing of the past. Prostitution now, Anne said, is something done by women who are young, indoors, online and foreign.
So what else has changed and what has stayed the same in the drug scene in the decades I’ve been reporting on it?
The drugs today are somewhat different. A generation back, heroin was the dominant drug. Now heroin has been supplemented with cocaine and, more recently, crack cocaine. Heroin users have always been a hazard to the rest of us with their shoplifting and purse-snatching, but, once their heroin craving is sated, they are generally a fairly torpid lot Crack users, it seems to me, stay volatile and aggressive all the time, as we see too often in the unpleasant and sometimes menacing atmosphere on the streets of our cities and towns. A street name for heroin is “smack”, which I tell you in order to explain a piece of street wisdom which I endorse: “A crackhead is worse than a smackhead”.
Some of the addicts I meet these days have been on methadone for decades. Perhaps they got addicted before they realised what they were getting into. Others are young enough to have seen their older relatives and neighbours ruin their lives, or die, through drug abuse and yet these young people have not been put off going down the same path themselves. Why would anyone destroy their life in this way?
As a journalist who has been reporting on this story for decades, let me now, please, in the rest of this article, give my own views on drug addiction and how we might try to help people out of it.
I’ll start with a paradox that puzzled me for years. Why is it that it is mostly poor people who use heroin, which is the most expensive drug? Cheaper drugs such as cocaine and cannabis are used across the social classes. If heroin were a drug favoured by the rich we would say, of course, they are the only ones who can afford it. So why heroin should be a drug of the poor needs explanation.
My answer is that unless you’re very rich, like a pop star perhaps, you have to be poor to be able to afford a heroin habit. Working people can’t manage a work/heroin balance for long. To sustain a heroin habit, you have to be enabled by the state.
I’ve often heard journalists and activists assert that “state neglect” has caused heroin abuse to spread among poor people. I think nothing could be further from the truth. A heroin addict is paid more state attention than any other citizen. The state attends on him for every aspect of his life. The state pays him his dole. If he is in rented accommodation the state pays most of that rent. When he commits a crime the state pays his legal costs. Then it pays to keep him in prison. If he proves unfit as a parent the state will take his children into care. The state pay all his medical costs. At the drug clinic the state gives him his methadone and, in addition, supplies of clean syringes and condoms. And if he should die from his drug abuse the state will help with his funeral costs. The state, through its Gardai, doctors, social workers, solicitors and a myriad of other professionals, attends upon a drug addict from the cradle to the grave.
Alcoholism counsellors tell us that alcoholics often have an “enabler”, that is, a well-intentioned but ultimately destructive family member who makes it possible for the alcoholic to persist in their alcohol abuse by protecting them from the consequences of their actions. When it comes to heroin addiction, the state is the ultimate enabler.
So how can addicts be weaned away from the enabling behaviour of the state? I’ll make one suggestion. I think addicts should be made to pay for their crimes. More precisely, I would make them pay their fines.
If a working person gets a conviction and fine for a crime he will generally pay that fine. Not so an addict. Go to any district court in the land and you will see the indifference with which addicts view fines; they will not pay but will opt for prison time in default. Talk to addicts who are up in court and you will find that they typically have accrued scores or even hundreds of previous convictions. Court holds no fear for them.
Then, in March of 2012, the then Justice Minister, Alan Shatter, struck fear into the hearts of Ireland’s drug addicts. He announced that legislation was being prepared that would allow court fines to be deducted from people’s social welfare payments.
At that time, I was working with RTE and I seized upon this initiative by Minister Shatter as a story well worth covering. Reporting for the radio programme Today with Pat Kenny, I stood outside the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin and spoke to people who had just been up in court. As ever, they told me they would not be paying their fines as that would be “stupid”. Much better to do a few hours prison in default, which they would do every few months, when fines had built up to a sufficient level to make it worthwhile for the guards to bring them in. Then I would tell my interviewees that it was now planned to take fines directly out of their dole. I wish the report had been for telly rather than radio. A person often answers with their face before they respond in words. The look of horror on the faces of my drug addict interviewees was more eloquent than any words that they spoke. As you can guess, the addicts were resolutely against the Shatter plan.
At last, I thought, drug addicts were to be made to face the consequences of their crimes. They would have to learn that the state would no longer let them away forever without paying. Then in July of 2013 Minister Shatter announced a u-turn. The Fines (Payment and Recovery) Act would only provide for fines to be deducted from the incomes of working people. For people who don’t work, there would be no change. I was never able to get an explanation from Minister Shatter, or the Department of Justice, as to why this government u-turn took place.
So, a decade later, could the original Shatter plan be revived? I don’t see why not. And how effective would it be in dissuading addicts from committing crime? Probably not immediately effective. An addict who is “sick” for lack of heroin is unlikely to be dissuaded from shoplifting by fear of a dole cut some time in the future. Addicts rarely think beyond the next fix. But I think that for addicts who may seriously want to give up drugs it would send them the message that the state is not always going to enable them in their habit. And that the rest of us don’t forever owe them a living.