Andy: Some High-Profile Drug Dealers Aren’t Under Enough Scrutiny

“Over 150 drug dealers operating in one of Dublin’s busiest shopping streets” – thus ran a fairly typical headline (in this case on dublinlive.ie in 2016). The street was O’Connell Street and the drugs in question were mostly heroin.

Mention drug use and abuse in Ireland and chances are you will conjure up a mental image of a heroin user shooting up with a syringe, or of cocaine being snorted in a nightclub bathroom.

But those activities, real and damaging as they are, are dwarfed in scale by excessive alcohol consumption and by the intake of drugs that are not just legal but are medically recommended and respectable.

The Sunday Business Post last week crunched some of the numbers for Ireland. Between 2006 and 2016, medical card prescriptions issued in Ireland for the addictive painkiller Oxycodone (originally derived from the opium poppy) shot upwards from 47,262 to 122,611.

Over the same period, prescriptions for another opioid, fentanyl, rose from 34,884 to 62,399. While the equivalent numbers for the third main such painkiller, codeine, went from 277,253 to a shocking 855,513.

And remember that these figures – the report also deals with over-prescription of sleeping tablets and anti-depressants – refer only to prescriptions for those on medical cards. Those (legally) paying for the drugs themselves are not included.

Much of this drug use may be justified and appropriate, but the alarming increase generates the worry that Ireland is going down the route of the United States, a country that is in the grip of a full-blown opioid crisis estimated to be killing 174 people every day and to have accounted for in excess of 200,000 deaths in less than 20 years.

Both President Donald Trump and the Democrats have been accused, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, of watering down legal and regulatory measures that might help tackle the crisis. Low-level, unregistered dealers may be cracked down upon, but the bigger corporate fish mostly swim free.

Which is not surprising – pharmaceutical companies were behind the US surge in opioid sales to begin with: funding doctors, researchers and others to push the products hard despite worries about long-term effectiveness and impact.

For example, Purdue Pharma, which produces Oxycodone (the brand name is OxyContin), persuaded doctors that this product in particular was the one to go for. Research was funded and doctors were paid to build the argument that longstanding concerns about opioid addiction were exaggerated. A US federal court found, in 2006, that the company had marketed the drug “with the intent to defraud or mislead”.

However, the fine that the company received was a small fraction of the profits they had already banked and continue to amass. Members of Dublin’s Kinahan crime cartel, whose drugs have killed far fewer people, would doubtless be delighted to walk away from court with a slap on the wrist like that.

And this brings us back to the double-think that pervades the whole question of drug use.

Midnight Line is the latest in the series of enjoyable crime thrillers by Lee Child, featuring former US military policeman Jack Reacher. This one touches on the opioid crisis, and in it a federal agent discusses how opioid users see themselves as different to “real” addicts:

Addicts are other people, with a dirty needle in a toilet stall. What they [opioid users] have is a pharmaceutical product, made in a lab by [people] in masks who hold test tubes up to the light, with wondrous concern radiating from their clear blue eyes. They’ve seen it on television, in the breaks between innings.

But, dressed up as it was in the guise of legitimate and legal pain relief, the impact of the opioid push was still, as the fictional agent puts it, that “America was flooded with hundreds of tons of heroin [equivalent], in purse-size blister packs, backed with foil.”

Woody Guthrie famously satirized the difference between “ordinary” crime and the white-collar variant:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

In similar vein, Irish crime correspondents could use a wider definition when they discuss the nefarious activities of organised drug gangs – they are not limited to the high-profile ones wreaking havoc in Dublin’s north inner city with the modern equivalents of Guthrie’s six guns, or to those dealing illegally on O’Connell Street.

The fountain pens of Big Pharma – manifested in corporate PR and dressed up in respectable suits – merit a lot more attention.