The Cocaine Is Flowing

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Ireland Calling with John Spain

The Cocaine Is Flowing

July 19, 2007

By John Spain

SUMMER time and the cocaine is flowing ... if you put a tune to that you could whistle it. It’s summer in Ireland, and in spite of the interminable rain the country is at play, with festivals, celebrity concerts (last week it was Barbra Streisand and Rod Stewart), race meetings, packed bars and weekend long rock events. All of which means the cocaine is flowing.

In the past few weeks it’s been flowing literally here as users at outdoor events have had their lines washed away as they attempted to have a sniff during the rain showers. It’s flowing all the time in Dublin’s sewers (tests have shown high levels in sewage water where it ends up after passing through the body).

And it’s been flowing around in the sea off the south coast recently after that attempt to land a huge quantity of the drug that went so badly wrong.

Some of the media here actually presented this enormous cocaine seizure (1.5 tons of high-grade cocaine in over 60 bales with more probably on the seabed) as a coup for the cops. Keystone cops would be closer to the truth.

Huge amounts of cocaine are being smuggled in here every year and only a small fraction is detected. This seizure happened only because the dinghy bringing in the drugs in heavy seas got into trouble and had to be rescued!

Because of its clean, non-addictive image (which, of course, is complete nonsense) cocaine is now the drug of choice for the Celtic Tiger generation, largely replacing cannabis, ecstasy and other so-called recreational drugs in recent years.

And because it does not involve any uncivilized stuff like needles it straddles the social divide, from the young muggers to the lawyers who represent them in court.

No club or pub here is immune, even in the swishest neighborhoods (some of them now spray their toilet seat lids with WD-40 oil spray to stop people setting out lines — the coke sticks to it). No really trendy society party here now is complete without a coterie of guests who slip into the bathrooms regularly and come out all bright-eyed and sniffing.

These occasional or weekend-only users are everywhere here. It’s part of the new affluent Ireland.

A lot of them appear to be able to handle it and can keep their cocaine use under control. But there are a lot more who can’t handle it and who soon lose control of the amount of cocaine they are using.

The affluence is part of the problem. With so much ready income and a plentiful and relatively cheap supply, why should they not use a bit more at weekends? And why shouldn’t the weekends start on Thursday nights?

Before they know it, they are in deep trouble. A&E departments at weekends now regularly have to deal with people having everything from paranoid panic attacks all the way up to people losing consciousness and having full blown seizures. It’s become such a problem that Ireland’s first specialist cocaine clinics are opening in Dublin and Cork later this year.

At the lowest levels here in deprived areas where heroin has been the main drug, cocaine is now also causing big problems. And it’s not a pretty up-the-nose scene.

In these areas addicts in search of the maximum bang for their bucks inject the cocaine rather than sniff it, and a lot of them use the needle in the groin area.

A woman who runs a project to help female cocaine users in Dublin’s north inner city recently reported that some of the women she sees have abscesses on their legs, blood clots and occasionally septicemia, and in several cases in recent years this has resulted in leg amputations. As I said, it’s not pretty.

All of which needs to be borne in mind when considering the implications of the seizure of the enormous quantity of cocaine off the wild and beautiful West Cork coast a couple of weeks back. It might have seemed amusing to some because of the Keystone cops aspect to it, but in reality there’s nothing funny about this dirty business.

Because of those involved, it seems likely that the huge haul had been destined for the British market rather than Ireland, but that may not be true. Even if it is true, it’s not much comfort because the haul was caught only by accident.

The truth is that this incident is an indication of how much must be getting through here when bad weather and an overloaded dinghy don’t combine to hand the smugglers on a plate to the Coast Guard.

I know someone who lives in the West Cork area, and he says that the Garda (police) and Coast Guard monitoring of what goes on along the miles of rugged coastline is “pathetic.” He says that local people know there is drug smuggling happening, and he says there are all kinds of stories locally about collusion and a blind eye being turned in exchange for cash.

That may be just talk. But what is beyond argument is that Ireland now has a major cocaine problem involving an annual consumption of the drug in quantities that are way beyond what could be smuggled in hidden in the luggage of individual passengers through airports and ferry ports where regular small seizures from drug “mules” are made. It’s on a scale that has to mean large scale smuggling of the kind that went wrong off the West Cork coast two weeks ago.

That part of West Cork is a popular holiday destination, and the arrival of a few British men with four wheel drive vehicles and a large dinghy would not be unusual, especially as they said in the local bars that they were interested in sea fishing and diving (there are lots of wrecks off the coast).

They were in the area for several weeks in a rented house before the night on which some of them set out in the dinghy and, in spite of bad weather, had a rendezvous with a large yacht well off shore from which the bales of cocaine were transferred.

Exactly what happened is still unclear, but it seems that the swell and the weight of the shipment combined to tip over the dinghy, and when the Coast Guard arrived they found at least one of the men swimming in the sea surrounded by bales of cocaine! As my teenage daughter says, duh!

Others involved who were not on the dinghy went on the run from the rented house before being captured by Gardai (police). Detectives subsequently searched the house and found high-tech communications and navigation gear.

Some days later an ocean-going catamaran, believed to be the mothership that off-loaded the drugs to the dinghy, was boarded near the northern Spanish port of La Coruna and two men were arrested. Both in Ireland and in Spain, police are now preparing cases against the men arrested.

The other aspect to the explosion of cocaine use in Ireland, of course, is the explosion of violence that has accompanied it. This has risen in direct proportion to the vast amounts of money that the drugs gangs here are making from the trade.

There is so much money involved that the gangs think nothing now of murdering rivals, and last weekend again (like so many weekends here now) a young man was blown away with a sawn-off shotgun when he answered a knock on his door in the Finglas area of the city.

It’s not clear yet whether this was cocaine related, but it has all the hallmarks of a gang killing. Those involved are frequently heavy users of their own merchandise and are often out of their heads, losing all sense of proportionality when arguments come up between the gangs.

The attitude seems to be to shoot to kill first. And it is the money from all the nice middle-class cocaine users in Dublin that drives this savagery.

This weekend, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern acknowledged that we need to do much more to make our coastline secure, although he seemed to be taking the view that we need support from the rest of the EU countries to do the job properly.

Spain appears to be the main gateway for cocaine coming into Europe, but Ireland is attractive for the smugglers as well, so what Ahern is saying makes sense. The tiny Irish Navy and Coast Guard service cannot cover the many miles of sparsely populated coastline around Ireland all the time. They are hopelessly stretched.

So in the meantime the cocaine will go on flowing. And the flood of misery it brings will go on flowing as well.

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