The most boring topic of conversation ever to grace (or annoy) society has to have been the endless commentary on the price of property in Ireland. Finally, it has taken a back seat and the new Irish obsession appears to be drugs. With daily headlines proclaiming that the country is awash with cocaine you would think that we were all constantly whipping out small mirrors and tightly rolling crisp fifty euro notes to use as straws. “It comes with prosperity”, said someone to me recently and I would have to agree. Along with the advantages of having money there is the rancid underbelly of people constantly looking for bigger and better highs and also that feeling of being untouchable.
In another recent conversation someone said that taking drugs was “a personal choice and it wasn’t their fault that their drug of choice happened to be illegal and that really it was no different to indulging in alcohol”. In my view this statement brought home the main difficulty that we currently face and that is that those in the professional and moneyed arenas, who are taking cocaine and other class A drugs recreationally, do not make the connection between their ‘bit of weekend fun’ in their fancy, alarmed leafy suburban streets and gun crime, gangland killings and bad drugs flooding into ordinary lives.