Opinion: Drug dealing and drug taking on the street has become a frightening public health issue.
A couple of days before St Patrick’s Day I took a short cut up though a laneway in Temple Bar. Beyond the network of laneways that leads to the quays the area was thronged with tourists revelling in what has become a spring break for the booze-hungry. Two men lost in conversation were walking down the laneway. One, unsteady on his feet, bashed into me. When he pulled away I saw he was holding a syringe.
The only remarkable thing about this incident is how unremarkable it is. Every day in inner-city Dublin replica montages of The Wire unfold. Dealers swap cash for drugs, queues gather waiting for the latest delivery, impatient addicts dodge into doorways to shoot up, undercover gardaí slouch against walls in tracksuits. It’s an open-air market.
This layer of augmented reality lies over the hustle and bustle of ordinary street life. Drug dealing and drug taking in Dublin city centre is so open, so prevalent, so part of the fabric of the city that eventually we deploy the same subconscious blinkers that we use to sidestep homeless people curled on cardboard or to breeze past chuggers as if they were ghosts. We use the term “junkie” to dehumanise addicts. Once we have dehumanised them we don’t need to deal with their realities. We don’t need to empathise or understand, because they are not of us, they are other. This daily coping mechanism ignores a frightening public health problem.
Theatreclub
Recently, the young Dublin theatre company Theatreclub, in association with Depaul Ireland, ran a three-day public conversation event called Addiction at the Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar. The level of research that precedes many of Theatreclub’s projects is something of a method approach. For Addiction the company worked in Depaul hostels for about a year for Addiction, running drama workshops with long-term and younger drinkers. Previously the company met Rachael Keogh – whose plight as a former heroin addict became a huge “story” for Sky News Ireland in 2006 – through researching their award- winning production Heroin .
“Drug addicts don’t vote,” says Theatreclub’s Grace Dyas, “They’re not registered to vote. Their families aren’t registered to vote. In terms of getting more funding at a departmental level it goes by the wayside. In 1996 there was a huge amount of investment after Veronica Guerin was shot and Josie Dwyer was killed in Rialto, and really, f*** all else after then.”
Decriminalisation
Dyas says Keogh’s insights into drug policies are especially relevant because she has lived those policies. In Portugal, where the company has performed Heroin , drug users were effectively decriminalised in 2000 when the government changed the criminal charge of drug possession to an administrative charge.
Source: Una Mullally, Irish Times, 07/04/14
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