A comprehensive strategy for substance abuse is needed before Northern Ireland's drug problem creeps up on society, a community worker said today.
As the British and Irish Governments prepared to discuss services for drug addicts and their families with the leaders of the devolved administrations in Dublin tomorrow, Nicola Verner for the Shankill based Forum for Action on Substance Abuse (FASA) urged Stormont to support community-based initiatives to educate children about the dangers of cocaine, cannabis and other drugs including alcohol.
"There are varying degrees of cocaine use out there at the moment and we have particular concerns about the under-resourcing of services in the community sector - particularly those for the under-18s," she said.
"There is a fixation with educating under-18s about the dangers of alcohol. "However there is a real danger than in focussing on one problem, we are ignoring the potential of other forms of substance abuse to creep up on us and spiral.
"Why put all your resources into focussing on just underage drinking, when there is a real danger of a cocaine problem and other forms of substance abuse coming up and just biting us?"
Concerns have been rising in nationalist and loyalist communities in recent months about the greater prevalence of drugs like cocaine in Belfast.
Last December a meeting at Stormont organised by Ulster Unionist Fred Cobain and Sinn Fein's Jennifer McCann was told three people in west Belfast died as a result of cocaine misuse in the last six months of 2007.
Benny Lynch of the Falls Community Council warned Belfast was catching up with the cocaine problem in working class areas of Dublin, Edinburgh and London and that his workers were coming across young girls taking the drug to keep thin.
He and other community workers from loyalist and republican neighbourhoods said government was not equipping them with the resources to tackle the drug problem and underage drinking.
Nicola Verner said she and her colleagues were now coming across people using crack cocaine.