NEW RESEARCH that reveals heroin use has reached record levels and is increasing most significantly in the regions should be seen as “a flashing warning light” if Ireland is to avoid “sleep walking” into a deeper hard drugs crisis, the former Mountjoy governor John Lonergan has said.
The Merchants Quay Ireland project has witnessed an increase in demand for its drug treatment services in Dublin, the Midlands and in all of its prison projects nationwide. These facts “simply cannot be ignored” by the Government and local communities.
“Heroin is going to be some scourge if it gets its roots into towns and villages and other cities in Ireland,” Mr Lonergan said when launching the projects annual report in Dublin yesterday.
“There should be a red light on the top of this report, flashing away, signalling to society ‘listen, there’s danger on the horizon’. We need to confront it. It’s a national issue; we’re sleeping walking if we think this is not.”
The project’s annual report shows the organisation delivered services to 9,422 people in 11 counties last year, facts which it says reflect the “growing crisis” of drug addiction and related homelessness across Ireland.
Demand for drug services was up 9 per cent last year and to date in 2010 demand for homeless services from drug users has increased by 16 per cent. In Dublin last year some 4,000 drug addicts used the project’s needle exchange facilities, with almost 642 new clients presenting for treatment.
Some 205 drug users presented at its drug treatment and harm reduction facility in Athlone, Co Westmeath, last year. That project is now dealing with people from Westmeath, Laois, Offaly and Longford.
Mr Lonergan said it was clear the heroin problem had spread into parts of the country where there had traditionally been no treatment options. This presented challenges in that communities would need to at first accept they had a hard drugs problem before they could begin to put treatment in place.
The problem was often ignored because local people did not want to face the truth about the local drug problem.
Merchants Quay Ireland chief executive Tony Geoghegan said the project’s funding had been cut each year since 2007 at a time when demand for its services was greater than ever.
He said demand was high for all of the project’s services, which include drug treatment and harm reduction programmes such as needle exchanges. The project also provides health services and facilities for homeless drug users as well as residential rehabilitation places.
Mr Geoghegan said the use of heroin in the regions had increased four-fold in recent years, much faster than in the drug’s traditional stronghold of Dublin.
