Illegal drug use - Urgent wake-up call needed

He wants the use of illegal drugs to be seen as socially unacceptable like drink driving.

For too long people tolerated drink driving, but the carnage on our roads served as a wake-up call. The victims were often young people overcome by the influence of alcohol and a sense of bravado. Their deaths were tragic but even more tragic were the deaths of so many innocent people killed by drunken drivers.

Those using illegal drugs are not only recklessly endangering themselves but also endangering others, because their behaviour is funding the gangsters behind the daily murders.

Describing such behaviour as antisocial is inadequate, because it obscures the obscene depravity of what has been happening.

A survey by the National Advisory Committee on Drugs last January concluded that the lifetime use of illegal drugs rose from 19% in 2004 to 24% in 2007. Thus almost a quarter of the people surveyed admitted to engaging in illegal drug taking.

The minister feels that the National Drugs Strategy has failed to get the message across in relation to cocaine, which was targeted by the media campaign called The Party’s Over. This campaign, run by the Health Service Executive, sought to exploit the impact of a number of high-profile deaths of people while using cocaine.

A recent Eurobarometer survey of drug use among 15 to 24-year-olds found that Irish youths have the second easiest access to cocaine, and Ireland ranked fifth out of 32 European countries for cocaine use last year in a UN report. While recent drug seizures should be warmly welcomed, the level of seizure is also an indication of the amount of drugs available, because the seizures normally reflect a fraction of the amount of drugs available.

Nobody should be surprised therefore that the Government’s campaign against cocaine had not worked. They are not doing anything that has not already failed dismally in other countries. The drink-driving campaign was enforced with the aid of breath testing, penalty points and advertising campaigns, but the cocaine campaign relied largely on advertising.

That amounted to tacking the symptoms rather than the problem. There was no new enforcement technique like the breath testing, or consequence such as the penalty points.

Bolstering the media campaign with a drug awareness programme in schools is unlikely to be any more effective unless adopted in conjunction with a multifaceted approach, as in the case of drink driving.

In underprivileged areas the drug barons in their flash cars have become the role models for gullible youngsters seeking an easy way out of their poverty. So long as such gangsters are seen as role models, there will always be people ready to make an easy euro by engaging in such loathsome behaviour.

Source: Irish Examiner 14/07/2008