Two recovering drug addicts told a Teachers' Union of Ireland conference on substance abuse how the support of individual teachers helped them in their struggle to get off drugs. Both warned drug abuse was now a "national epidemic".
A member of the Garda National Drugs Unit, Garda Noel Clarke, said the number of prosecutions for drug offences had risen from 3,859 in 1995 to 7,927 last year.
One of the former addicts, a young woman from Dublin's inner city, said she had loved school because it had given her a chance to prove herself as "an intelligent and decent human being", despite her alcoholic family background.
She had started taking drugs - speed - while at second-level school because it gave her lots of energy to dance all night at discos. She had also taken solvents and other drugs before moving on to heroin.
Warnings had never deterred her, despite her brother's previous involvement in drugs and crime, because she had always been certain she had control.
Even though she had been elected head girl and obtained her Leaving Certificate, she reached a position where all she wanted to do was take drugs and "saw leaving school as a weight off my shoulders, the end of responsibility."
When she left school she went back to talk to the one primary teacher who had tried to understand her. "She couldn't do anything for me. She didn't have the resources. It was enough for her to get through each day in her own primary school. However, she paid for me to do lectures at Trinity College Dublin."
The young woman, who asked not to be named, is now doing a third-level degree course. She said school had represented "the only form of stability, security, even love I ever felt."
A 30-year-old man from Ballymun, Dublin, a former heroin addict who is also recovering from alcohol and gambling addictions and now works with a drugs awareness and education programme, said he had had "a horrific upbringing". He had been sniffing glue on the day after he received his First Communion and had also used shoe polish and butane gas.
But he had been "academically very capable, although it did not show because of my personal problems." He remembered a teacher from Sligo who had encouraged him on the football pitch. "He gave me affirmation. I felt I was doing something right. I felt I belonged. That can make a huge difference to a young person's life."
When that teacher took the top stream for maths and English, the young man was in it, "because of his efforts on the football pitch."