‘Most drug users are functioning people. They go to work, go to college’

A workplace survey revealing narcotic addiction in Ireland is most likely ‘an underestimate’

Eddie Mullins, chief executive of Merchants Quay Ireland, a charity that provides addiction services, says many people are trying to conceal their drug use. Photograph: Dara MacDónaill
Eddie Mullins, chief executive of Merchants Quay Ireland, a charity that provides addiction services, says many people are trying to conceal their drug use. Photograph: Dara MacDónaill

A suggestion in a workplace survey that 16 per cent of employees are addicted to or have an unhealthy relationship with at least one Class A illegal drug is probably an underestimate, according to the head of one of the country’s leading addiction services.

The 2024 Workplace Wellbeing Index, a survey of 1,000 workers and 200 HR managers across a range of business sectors, commissioned by Laya Healthcare and launched at the company’s workplace summit last week, found 29 per cent of employees reported being addicted to or having an unhealthy relationship with nicotine, 21 per cent with alcohol and 22 per cent with illegal substances, including cannabis.

Sixteen per cent suggested they had a problem with their use of Class A drugs such as cocaine or heroin.

The figures were higher among men, those under 24 and those with a disability with a health condition. Managers and employees more likely to be contacted outside of ordinary working hours also reported higher percentages of drug use, with more than a quarter of some cohorts acknowledging a problem.

READ MORE

Laya’s Sinéad Proos said the findings highlighted that addiction was a “serious issue impacting on Irish workplaces”, one employers needed to recognise.

Dublin’s crack cocaine epidemic: ‘You get a rush. You come down. And then you have to go again’Opens in new window ]

The figures are high by comparison with the most recent findings of the Health Research Board’s National Drugs and Alcohol Survey, published three years ago. That research found 7.4 per cent of all adults reported “recent or last year” use of illegal drugs while the proportion of male respondents aged between 25-34 who said they had recently used cocaine had increased more than fivefold in 17 years, from 1.8 per cent to 9.4 per cent.

Eddie Mullins, the chief executive of Merchant’s Quay, a leading charity providing addiction and homelessness services in Dublin, suggests the landscape is complex with prescription and other medications playing a part too but believes all of the figures are likely underestimates.

“I think there’s an awful lot of people who are habitually using drugs or trying to conceal it and hide it and a survey would fail to capture that,” he says.

“I’m convinced that it’s under-reported. Cocaine use is really at an epidemic proportion. We tend to focus on chronic addiction, on street drug selling and drug taking, a cohort of people who are totally marginalised,” says Mullins, a former governor of Mountjoy Prison. “But most drug users are functioning people. They go to work or they go to college and they manage to maintain a drug habit. They use drugs but it hasn’t taken over their lives.”

That is not, he says, to suggest it does not affect them.

“There are days lost in work because people are feeling the ill effects of the party the night before with cocaine or whatever, and they simply don’t go to work,” says Mullins. “I actually think the new phenomenon of working from home is also making it easier for people, because you’re not under that same scrutiny … you can get up in the morning and be in bits, log on and do what you need to do while you kind of get yourself together.

“And there are certainly people too who are using it more regularly, who are going into the toilet at work and using cocaine. So it’s a bit of everything. There’s no one particular factor in this that sticks out above another.”

Mullins says middle-class use is what is driving the surge in cocaine consumption in Ireland.

“Young professionals, students, young people in general, don’t look at cocaine the way they would look at heroin. It’s part of your social fabric and they think it’s fine. You go, you have your line of coke, you might have a few drinks and it’s party time. But it is still [a] secret. People won’t admit to it. That’s why I think that figure is probably underestimating it now, not levels of addiction, but certainly habitual drug use.”

Mullins is concerned about the longer-term mental health consequences of drug abuse, of what will happen 10 years down the line.

But Caroline Reidy of the HR Suite, a consultant who advises many companies on issues related to their staff, has a more immediate concern — the impending Christmas party season.

Reidy, who will speak on Tuesday at a Legal Island-run employment conference at the Aviva Stadium about dealing with intoxicants in the workplace, says many people do not appreciate the blurred lines between work and work-related socialising.

“Anything that happens in the course of your work is a work-related issue,” she says.

“If we work together and decide to go for drinks after work, you go out with a client to do an end-of-year review over drinks or, you know, the Christmas party … any of those events are an extension of work and so dignity and respect at work policies, codes of ethics and appropriate work behaviour, all kick into gear.”

Drug use, she suggests, is a growing source of the type of issues that arise during the seasonal spike in complaints and incidents traditionally attributable to excessive alcohol use.

“If something goes wrong in terms of dignity and respect, if an appropriate comment or an appropriate gesture is made then ultimately a person can end up in trouble, including being dismissed,” she says. “There are a lot of complex and sensitive issues for employers involved and we would do a lot of investigations into allegations over the Christmas period.”

Emmet Malone

Emmet Malone

Emmet Malone is Work Correspondent at The Irish Times