A grim tour of the backstreets of the capital…
IT’S TEN O’CLOCK in the morning in a damp laneway on Dublin’s northside.
Around the corner, on Liffey Street, shops and cafés are doing a brisk trade in breakfast rolls and Americanos.
But here, on Lotts Lane, a small group is listening to a drug worker and campaigner explain the grim connection between the needles littering the gutter, the human excrement nearby, and used condoms thrown on the cobbles.
“Mephedrone is a drug that people would be injecting,” the campaigner – Ana Liffey Drug Project’s Tony Duffin – explains.
“Mephedrone is a stimulant and a hallucinogen. It would be associated with heightened sexual activity and risk-taking behaviours. They’re sexual beings as well so… The risk-taking in terms of drug use and sexual activity means that there’s risk – so condoms are important.”
Duffin is leading drugs minister Aodhán Ó Ríordáin and a small group of reporters and photographers on a walk around the lanes and alleyways of the city centre – around Abbey Street, through O’Connell Street, and over to the Department of Health, near the Screen Cinema.
What’s on view – once you pause, and consider the scenes – is shocking.
Source: Daragh Brophy, The Journal, 01/12/15
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