Cocaine is "the most worrisome of all hazards" facing Irish young people, an accident and emergency consultant has warned. Carol Duffy reports.
Speaking at Waterford Institute of Technology yesterday as part of its Alcohol Awareness Week, Dr Chris Luke, A&E consultant at Cork University Hospital, said: "This is the most worrisome of all hazards in relation to youth or popular culture in Ireland and it is something that is beginning to blow like a whirlwind around the streets and towns of Ireland.
"It is behind the hideous atrocities in Ireland, in Limerick, west Dublin, the midlands and Belfast. It is an appalling drug and is known rightly as 'the Devil's dandruff'.
"It is associated with astonishing levels of violence, violence to the body of the consumer and to others around them and the drug."
The consultant pointed out that it was being used by all members of society, not just a select few.
"It is ordinary white-collar people. It is all over. I had 12 or 14 cases in just one of the small departments in Cork city in the last few months. We are seeing it exactly the same way it began in north America and the UK. It is going to bring a huge increase in the terrible amount of violence we see."
Dr Luke said he had treated a professional in his 20s recently. "He had 12 gardaí, an elephant load of sedatives, and was handcuffed to the trolley with all the old people around him petrified and he woke up the next day without any recollection of the event.
"An ordinary drunk needs three or four people to calm them down, but he needed 12. 'Jekyll and Hyde' is what happens to the ordinary person when they take cocaine."
Dr Luke said greater prosperity among young people had led to a greater strain on the health service.
"In Ireland it is obvious to everybody that the health service is creaking and groaning and is collapsing under the weight of our new lifestyle. The nation is richer than it has ever been, and yet the health service is under severe pressure because of this lifestyle.
"The overwhelming problem is alcohol. It sounds a dreary message, but it is the oldest and most persuasive drug, and all the other hazards follow from that. People don't take drugs on their own. It follows on from the drink, as it loosens peoples inhibitions."