Cocaine and Irish women: ‘I’m a wife. I’m a mother. I have a career. I’m a user’

Earlier this week the Health Research Board (HRB) revealed that, along with recording the highest number of drug treatment cases on record last year, there has been a sharp increase in cocaine use among women.

Responding to the HRB findings, Labour TD Alan Kelly expressed concern that use of the illegal drug is starting to be viewed as acceptable across Irish society, and called on Government to lead a campaign with other organisations to challenge that perception.

“We have a real issue with the so-called middle classes in this country creating a narrative that cocaine use is okay,” he said.

We spoke to some women about their personal experience of using the illegal drug.

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‘I hate this misconception that people who take recreational drugs are just scumbags’

Emma* is in her late 30s and says she uses cocaine “a few times a year” which is less frequently than she used to. Cocaine inevitably leads to a “long session”, with nights out continuing until 5am or 6am, and that’s hard to manage with “kids that have to be looked after the next day,” she says. She tends to use now only when there’s someone to watch her young child the next morning, or if she’s on a weekend away.

She started using cocaine when she was on her early 20s and took it at house parties, gigs and festivals. Initially she was scared to take the drug, but she watched her friends taking drugs without any serious adverse effects, which made her feel more confident. She uses it now in many of the same settings, although the opportunity to do so has diminished because of her family situation. “I’m a wife. I’m a mother. I have a career. I’m a responsible adult. I hate this misconception that people who take recreational drugs are just scumbags,” she says.

She and her husband take cocaine together sometimes, she says. She says she is not afraid of something happening to them as a consequence of taking the drug. “If anything I’m more worried about feeling sick the next day or that I’d be too hungover.”

She’s aware of the criminal activities fuelled by drugs, and believes cocaine should be decriminalised. “It’s criminalised by our legal system and for me that’s the issue,” she says. She has never worried about becoming addicted and has no plans to stop using cocaine.

‘Overdosing never crosses my mind, probably because I’ve had a good bit of alcohol’

Sophie* is 30 years old. She started using cocaine when she was 26, taking it for the first time at a house party.

“There wasn’t a huge amount of thought went into it,” she says. She had been drinking beforehand. The cocaine made her feel more confident but also very anxious, but says she has never done anything she regrets while high.

That party wasn’t the first time she had been offered cocaine. A couple of years earlier, while working in a bank, she was offered cocaine by colleagues, including a manager, she says, while on a work night out.

She says she takes cocaine a few times a year and gets it through people that her friends know. But she wouldn’t be afraid to go through a dealer herself, she says. “I’ve been there when they bought it. It’s just very normal people ... If I met them on the street, I’d just think they had an ordinary job. That they were not involved in any form of criminality.”

She has been present when a fellow partygoer overdosed and almost died. This frightened her. Still, about six months later, she took cocaine again. “It [overdosing] never crosses my mind in the moment, probably because I’ve had a good bit of alcohol beforehand,” she says. She only ever takes cocaine after she has been drinking alcohol.

The last time Sophie bought a bag of cocaine it cost her €60-€80 per gramme, which she feels is cheap enough if you’re working. “I don’t like the whole industry behind it,” she says. It has been a few months since she last used, because of this. “I’m not saying never again,” she says, “but that’s not something I want to contribute to ... fun and all as it is.”

‘Nobody knew in work. They hadn’t a clue’

Olive* is in her 40s. She says she started using cocaine following a bereavement. She drank heavily at first and met a new group of friends who were regular cocaine users, and she began to join in. She was in her mid-20s at this stage and took cocaine most weekends for a couple of years. But she says she never recognised she had a problem because she was never the one buying the drug.

She felt “confident and buzzed” when on cocaine, unlike the extremely vulnerable positions she had found herself in when she was drinking. She stayed out until 6am or 7am on a cocaine high, and would have sex with a man from the group at 6am and “felt brilliant”, she says. She never had bad comedowns. Sometimes she’d do a “two-day bender” at the weekend, staying out all Sunday night until 6am. “And I would go to work on the Monday morning, and I would drive. Nobody knew in work. They hadn’t a clue,” she says.

On one occasion she went to “an old man’s pub” with her friends. The group decided to buy cocaine and they took it while surrounded by carvery lunches and older people drinking pints, she says. She didn’t get “the same buzz” and thought “this is not what I want to do with this drug”. She realised her friends were “a bit addicted”, whereas she associated cocaine with “party central”.

Olive says she never thought of the more sinister side of who or what she was funding through her cocaine use. “It never entered my head. And I only did it with these people [new friends] so I trusted them. They would have had a lot of money, so they would have got the best that they could get,” she says.

She never thought about the potential dangers of taking cocaine either.

Olive moved to the UK for a period. She met her partner, who is also Irish, while there. An opportunity to take cocaine arose while out one night, but this time her reaction to the drug was different. Witnessing this, her partner threatened to end the relationship if she ever took cocaine again. So she stopped.

She and her partner moved back to Dublin several years ago and have children together now. She has stayed away from cocaine and doesn’t believe she would touch it again, but says she has “thought about it”.

The addiction expert: ‘People lose control of their relationship with cocaine’

Prof Bobby Smyth, chair of the Addiction Faculty at the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland, says the number one concern in relation to cocaine usage is that “people might lose control of their relationship with cocaine and develop an addiction”. For those who use cocaine on a regular basis “a third of them will develop an addiction,” he says.

“You’re at increased risk of having a heart attack ... increased risk of a stroke,” Prof Smyth explains. In cases where emergency departments are seeing events like this in relatively young people, there’s a suspicion “a drug like cocaine is involved. It’s contributing to some presentation of cardiovascular problems at young ages”.

For anyone with any underlying mental health problems, cocaine usage can have an exacerbating effect, he says. But it also has the short-term effect of squeezing “all the happy chemicals out of your brain”, meaning for those who use heavily at the weekend “there’s less of those natural happy chemicals to get you through the beginning of the following week”.

“When people are intoxicated and dis-inhibited they can behave in pretty reckless and self-destructive manners,” he continues. “In those intoxicated states people can engage in impulsive acts, so can contribute to self-harm. It can also, of course, contribute to violence against other people.”

[ Cocaine as easy to get as pizza in rural Galway, says FG councillor ]

In terms of damage to the nose, Prof Smyth explains that cocaine “causes the blood vessels in the nose to narrow” and also “has a local anaesthetic effect”. “Whatever you’re snorting the cocaine with, you can ram that into your nose and you won’t feel anything. It can allow you damage your nose, not notice the damage while also damaging the blood vessels in your nose, which means they don’t get a chance to repair”. In extreme cases this can mean the septum, the wall that divides one nostril from the other “eventually just erodes away”, he says.

*Names have been changed.