According to the confidential online questionnaire they completed, as part of the wider Global Drug Survey, covering 20 countries in all, 59% are either in full or part-time employment. Meanwhile, 55.4% and 8.7% respectively are in full and part-time education. In other words, this is a well educated, productive cohort. The average age of respondents is 25.6 years with an almost equal male/female split.
“The vast majority of people who take drugs are socially well-adjusted, otherwise law abiding and neither seeking, nor in need of, medical treatment,” reflects the London-based Consultant Psychiatrist & Addiction Medication Specialist, Dr. Adam Winstock, who co-ordinates the GDS. “Sometimes, though, they overdo it or make bad choices which endanger themselves and/or others.
“One of the main functions of the Global Drug Survey is alerting them to those dangers,” Winstock adds, “as well as suggesting safer practices and generally promoting harm reduction. We’re just finalising the world’s first-ever, safer drug- using limits, starting off with cannabis. There’s a little applet where you put in how much weed you smoke in a day, hit a button and it’ll tell you what your risk is.”
As in 2014, cannabis is far and away Ireland’s illegal drug of choice with a 60.8% user rate. While the national figure for the use of nicotine is far lower, in this drug-friendly group, cannabis lags only 4% behind the tobacco it’s almost invariably mixed with, to smoke in spliffs.
Despite keeping a good few head-shops in business, bongs, pipes and vaporisers have never really caught on in a significant way with the ordinary drug user here. At €25 a gram, cannabis sold in Ireland is the most expensive weed in the world, but that hasn’t stopped it comprehensively outselling the new wave of synthetic cannabis, a gram of which costs around a tenner.
One of the most important findings in the survey is that, where cannabis is concerned, it really does seem a case of ‘natural is best’. An alarming 3.5% of synthetic cannabis users have sought emergency medical treatment, compared to the 0.4% of traditional cannabis smokers who’ve reported to Irish A&E over the past 12 months, most of them citing anxiety attacks as their reason for doing so.
At 1.1%, Ireland’s consumption of synthetic cannabis is currently relatively low, compared to the UK – where the equivalent figure is 2.3%. The way the GDS organiser sees it, the biggest risk has to do with price, with synthetic cannabis being flogged at €10 a gram, against €25 for the same amount of herbal cannabis.
“It’d be great if Irish cannabis dealers dropped their bloody prices,” he says, “because that’d remove the financial incentive to switch to synthetic cannabis, which is 30 times more likely to result in people seeking emergency medical treatment than even high-potency skunk. We’re also identifying a risk of withdrawal symptoms with synthetic cannabis – which has never been a factor with cannabis. Drugs are a capitalist commodity; people have a finite amount of money and unfortunately some are tending to use a form of cannabis that’s just really nasty and really dangerous.”
Their eschewing of synthetic cannabis in favour of considerably more expensive herbal varieties also suggests that Irish smokers are looking for a pleasurable high rather than getting mindlessly wasted.
Cognitive Enhancers
The Global Drug Survey 2015 also sheds light on the prevalence here of so called cognitive enhancers, i.e. substances that are used to improve performance at work or whilst studying. 12% of Irish respondents have used the likes of methylphenidate, modafinil and either illegal or prescription amphetamines – a figure that will send shivers along the spines of parents of Leaving Cert students and college kids alike.
“They’re not using coke and speed to get high,” Dr. Winstock says. “They’re doing it to deal with work and other performance anxiety pressures. It’s a big story that we’ll be teasing out over the coming months.”
Needless to say, when Dr. Winstock and his team do, you’ll read about it first in Hot Press.
It’s also interesting what drugs Irish people aren’t taking – or not currently at any rate. You can’t walk around London at the weekend without being offered a balloon of nitrous oxide, but its past year usage here is only 3.1%, down from 2014’s 5%.
“Nitrous was seen as this totally, 100% safe thing you did on a night out – but there’s been a tripling from 2.5% to 7.5% in the number of the people in the UK expressing concern about it,” says Adam Winstock.
While the GDS 2015 offers relatively few new insights into Ireland’s relationship with alcohol, it does produce some interesting stats such as 29.6% saying they’ve not been able to do what’s expected of them the next day. The global average is 6%.
37.9% want to drink less, second only to Australia at 38.9% – one interpretation here is that the thought police of the new anti-alcohol moralism have successfully got into people’s heads, but not their hearts; 14.6% said others have expressed concern about their drinking; and 10.9% have been physically assaulted by somebody who’s drunk.
At 3.2% the survey suggests that we have the highest percentage of people seeking alcohol-related emergency medical treatment.
Again, however, the efficacy of the Government’s policy of taxing alcohol to the limit and putting a minimum pricing policy into effect is undermined by the results elsewhere. It is instructive that two countries where alcohol is cheap, Portugal and Spain, are at the bottom of the ‘seeking emergency medical treatment’ table at 0.7% – suggesting that it's naïve in the extreme to think that minimum pricing would magically solve Ireland's perceived problems in relation to drinking.
As in previous years, the Global Drug Survey 2015 is guaranteed to be the subject of impassioned debate...
Pills And Powders
While cannabis users appear to be a relatively conservative, safe-minded bunch, the same is not true of those who are into pills and powders. The number of people ingesting ‘mystery white powders’ here has shown an increase of over 20%, from 9.2% to 11.9%. Both anecdotal and medical evidence indicate that these powders are often ketamine or mephedrone, one of the legal highs banned in 2010 by Mary Harney.
“All you do when you ban a drug is drive it underground and onto the black market,” Winstock insists. “Only in Poland (19.1%) and the UK (13.7%) are mystery white powders more popular than they are in Ireland. Why would people take something not knowing what it is? Because 80% of them are already pissed or high.”
What is the appropriate response? One view is that effective advocacy and drugs education are the key.
“It’s about old school harm reduction,” he states. “Don’t try something for the first time when you’re off your face. The group I would really emphasise here is young women. Don’t go and snort a random white line from a bloke at a party, who you don’t know. You might think it’s cocaine, but instead you find that it’s a sedative that leaves you mute and unable to move – and you’re sexually assaulted.”
As discussed in our interview with the Minister with Responsibility for Drugs Strategy, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, there have been 10 new HIV cases in Dublin among injecting drug-users – a figure that local addiction specialist Dr. Garrett McGovern describes as “being off the Richter Scale.” The Director of the Ana Liffey Drug Project, Tony Duffin, believes there may be a link to mephedrone, which although traditionally snorted or swallowed can also be injected.
While it’s not something Dr. McGovern has encountered among his own opiate- dependent clients, the intravenous use of mephedrone has become a significant problem in London.
“A minority of gay men involved in the chem-sex scene here in the UK are injecting mephedrone and, because it makes you quite horny, they end up having multiple partners,” Adam Winstock claims. It is a view that might anger gay advocacy groups. But he is insistent.
“They don’t know how to inject drugs and are sharing needles,” he states, “so they’re engaging in two types of high-risk behaviour. I run a chem-sex clinic and have seen three people this year who’ve seroconverted. What you need for that group who are already stigmatised because of their sexual and drug-using behaviours are LGBT-friendly services. The centre of London’s gay-chem sex scene is a mile from my clinic, so while serious it’s also atypical.
“I’ve seen very few existing drug injectors move to mephedrone.Their drug dealers are flogging them coke and crack; there’s enough of a profit on that.”
Another unwelcome stat is the 1.4% of Irish MDMA users who’ve sought emergency medical treatment over the last 12 months – the second-highest in the world next to Scotland at 1.8%. On first inspection that appears to confirm the widespread belief here that ecstasy pills and powders have become less pure, though Adam Winstock reckons the opposite might be the case.
“There’s lots of better MDMA around and people don’t know to bloody use it,” suggests the man who’s crunched the Global Drug Survey numbers. “The tagline being, ‘Better quality drugs aren’t necessarily safer if you don’t know what the ‘appropriate’ dosage is.’”
The biggest survey of its kind, the GDS 2015 was also conducted in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Hungary, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom (excluding Scotland) and the United States with The Journal, Spin, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, Men’s Health, La Liberation, Vice, Zeit and The Australian among the other international media partners.
Find out more at [link]globaldrugsurvey.com[/link], [link]drinksmeter.com[/link] and [link]drugsmeter.com[/link]