VIEWPOINT DRUGS CRISIS by Terry Maguire


had a powder formulation they touchingly named ‘Molly’ because methylenedioxymethamphetamine is a bit of a mouthful.


ut of breath rushing to the polling booths so that I could help maintain the sectarian status quo, I then had to rush off to a community meeting called to address a local drug crisis. My invitation to join the panel was at short notice but I accepted; I am the local pharmacist and I am a concerned citizen. The last time this problem got out of hand I ended up with the point of a Bowie knife up my nose and more of that I could well do without.


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The weekend before, two local young men had died from overdose. A 27 year old was found dead on Sunday morning and an 18 year old, found unconscious the same day, had his life support machine turned off on Wednesday. The community was shocked and everyone was horrifi ed. Something needed to be done. Where are these drug dealers selling drugs to our children? We need a meeting!


My brief was to educate, to cover the types of drugs involved and to inform the meeting of what had worked elsewhere. I know nothing much about illicit drugs and less still about successful drug policy or strategy, and I had my reservations too about the meeting organisers. But I was confi dent that I would be OK and so, as all experts do, I took to the


42 - PHARMACY IN FOCUS Internet.


I told the 150-strong audience who turned out that two young lives cut short is doubly tragic but, in the greater scheme of things, we were pretty well off by comparison. In the last ten years in Belfast, of the 46,240 preventable deaths the Public Health Agency has identifi ed, 2,524 were linked to ‘drug use disorders’ and 2,476 linked to ‘alcohol related disease’. There were only 46 deaths attributed to ‘illicit drugs use’. Boring prescription drugs and booze, it seems, far outshine the petty death rate from headline-grabbing illegal drugs.


What was happening locally, I continued, had happened here before, was happening elsewhere and would happen again. In the summer of 2013, ten deaths in young men were eventually linked to use of a toxic metabolic variant of the rave drug Ecstacy. Ecstacy, an amphetamine-based stimulant, was back on the scene with a vengeance. According to the Irish Times, a lab in the Netherlands was producing MDMA tablet with strengths of between 150 mg and 300 mg and they had delightfully called it ‘Cherry’. This was an improvement on the standard 1990s tablet strength of about 80 mgs. The Dutch lab also


Another variant - ‘Mastercard’ - was linked to the death of a 16 year old in Manchester during the May Day weekend. She was one of six young women from the same party who were hospitalised. An A&E consultant told the Independent newspaper that his team were treating patients ‘blind’. They didn’t know what they were dealing with, so they were fi ghting the symptoms and hoping. It was metabolic Russian Roulette, he told the reporter, and this young woman had lost, as did another young woman in Lancashire the weekend before who had taken ‘Cherry’.


Amphetamine and its metabolic variants have a habit of striking down the naive abuser, often someone who has never taken drugs before. Experimental abuse of illicit drugs is not recommended, especially when the dose per tablet has increased threefold and varies by 50 per cent between tablets. Try telling that to a drunken peer group at a Saturday- night rave.


I then told the meeting of a heroin user who claimed to have gone to a dealer to buy cannabis and - fi nding it of particularly ‘good quality’ - returned a few times for more. Finding that she now could think of nothing but the cannabis, and unable to afford to buy, she was refused a supply ‘on loan’ while being told that her cannabis was laced with heroin. This normal 29 year old found herself in Belfast City centre stealing clothes to maintain a habit.


I fi nished up by saying that social deprivation was a strong indicator for an illicit drug culture and indeed, in my part of Belfast, there is plenty


of that. In addition, availability of the drug is key, as is the fact that most drug deaths are associated with taking a cocktail with alcohol.


When it came to questions, I was attacked for saying that there is a bigger danger in our communities from prescribed medicines. A young lady asked if the new law she’d heard of would resolve the problem of ‘legal highs’.


This nifty piece of legislation, the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016, is designed to put a blanket ban on sales and supply of any substance that affects the brain and is not a licensed medicine, nicotine, caffeine or tobacco. But experts predict a fi eld day for forensics experts, pharmacologists and lawyers as the view is that this new law is unworkable. It will be extremely diffi cult to secure criminal convictions, since no one can easily prove that a substance is capable of producing a psychoactive effect ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ required in our courts.


From there, in the absence of a legal process, the discussion moved on to what was to be done with the drug dealers. At this point my suspicions that my hosts were from ‘the left’ were realised, and so I made my excuses and left. Yet on the way home I could not help feeling that these people, more left wing than Stalin himself, were doing more in bringing the community together than the mainstream politicians I had given my vote to earlier in the evening. •


THESE VIEWS ARE ENTIRELY THOSE OF THE AUTHOR AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE OPINIONS OF EITHER PROFILE PUBLISHING & DESIGN LTD. OR THE ULSTER CHEMISTS’ ASSOCIATION.


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