Drug Of The Poor

As things stand our Government would have you believe in documents like the national drug strategy that the problem of heroin addiction is primarily a medical one and that it should be treated on an individual basis. Whilst I do not deny that addiction is a complex problem, with definite medical implications there is one glaringly obvious fact that successive governments have chosen to ignore, the  fact that heroin is not evenly dispersed in our communities.


If for instance over the last thirty years large proportions of the young people in one of our more affluent neighbourhoods had developed life threatening medical conditions, then it is reasonable to assume that our government would have investigated what it is in these neighbourhoods that was a contributing factor. That seems only sensible really, not a science fiction type analogy, quite simplistic. 


Why then is it that sucessive governments whom have identified heroin addiction as a medical problem have not gone to the neighbourhoods that are producing disproportionate amounts of heroin addicts to investigate. Why is it that they continuously fail to recognize this very simple and glaringly obvious fact, heroin is not even distributed in our country, it ravages very distinct communities and yet our government continues to address the problem on an individual basis. 


Why has very little time or money been put into finding out what it is about these communities that makes their young people suseptible to the charms of opiate abuse. Is it that really looking at this aspect of heroin in Ireland would open a can of worms, would it mean that we as a nation would have to face up to some stark facts about how we live, how we re-distributed wealth, facts about our education system, our social welfare system, facts about how we as a so called catholic country live in one of the most un-equal societies in the modern world and facts about how greed and neo-liberalism have widened this gap even further. 


If you want a window into the future then cast your eye across the atlantic to our neo-liberal cousins in America, a country where drugs have ravaged whole working class and ethnic communities. A country where in certain cities whole area's have been cut adrift and allowed to degenerate. Do not be fooled drugs have not and will not go away, they continue to change and develop and until we begin to address some of the fundamental questions of equality that define the neighborhoods in which they flourish, then things will continue to get worse.