In his darker moments, Tony Geoghegan wonders if the battle against drugs can ever be won. The director of one of the country's best-regarded drug treatment facilities, Merchant's Quay, in Dublin, says 10 new cases of heroin addiction are recorded every single week. The drug first reached epidemic levels in urban Ireland in the late 1970s and it remains just as pernicious today.
"There are 10,000 people on methadone programmes in the country today," Geoghegan says, "but there probably are as many as 20,000 people who are heroin addicts.
"It can feel very dispiriting to see yet more young people present themselves with heroin addiction each week. They tend to be men in their mid-20s who have been drug abusers for years. They may have been injecting themselves for a year before we see them."
Source: John Meagher, Irish Independent, 15/10/2011
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