Heroin addiction among Irish teenage girls has increased fourfold despite an overall decrease amongst adolescent heroin addicts. Female teenage addicts seeking treatment now outnumber their male counterparts, a new study in the Irish Journal of Psychiatric Medicine has shown.
In the same period in which the increase has occurred, teenage heroin dependency has been reduced to a tenth of what it was in the 1990s. The authors of the study, John Fagan, Leena Naighton and Bobby Smyth, believe the erosion of sexist attitudes towards drug-taking has led to the increase.
"The idea that it was OK for guys to go off getting drunk and off their heads but not for girls has a similar basis in the drug-taking community," Smyth said. "That has changed now, and those sexist attitudes and social taboos have been diminished."
While teenage heroin addiction has greatly decreased in Dublin, the Drug Treatment Centre Board now faces the added challenges of both a gender and geographical shift. "Previously there was a ratio of four males to one female; for addicts in their 30s it's about three to one, in their 20s about two to one, and now 50-50 for teenagers," Smyth said.
Half of all referrals of teenage heroin addicts now come from outside "traditional heroin hotspots" in Dublin, Smyth said, with the Drug Treatment Centre Board seeing more and more young addicts from Louth, Kildare, Meath and Wicklow.
Source: Sunday Tribune, 06/07/2008
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