Is cocaine killing our young people? Where are the facts?
Monday, December 17th, 2007 by Frank
It’s hard not to be under the impression that we are under siege from cocaine in Ireland at the moment, it’s screaming at us from tabloid headlines for the last few weeks, and has been slowly building to this crescendo for several months now.
It has all come to a head with the deaths of Katy French and of Kevin Doyle and John Grey.
But what exactly killed these young people? Firstly, Katy French’s death may not have been directly cocaine related, but who would guess that from most of the media reporting? Until the rumours are confirmed, let’s not give them more weight than they deserve.
So that leaves Kevin Doyle and John Grey. These two young men reportedly ate cocaine when it got too damp to snort.
And yet no report I have seen, heard or read has mentioned how this can be dangerous. I admit freely I don’t follow current affairs very closely, but these stories have been hard to avoid, and yet I am left wondering how these young men died.
The chances are that the two young men overdosed when they took the drug by eating it - but this is not something I have read in any report of their deaths.
Young people who use cocaine and know that eating cocaine doesn’t automatically result in death will find this kind of reporting hysterical and will not relate the deaths of these young men to their own circumstances.
If the country is in the grips of a dangerous epidemic, shouldn’t a responsible media be helping to educate and inform a public who may be in danger of killing themselves? Surely the media could do a much better job of alerting the public to the very real dangers of cocaine use or abuse?
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