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Title: The Heroin menace
Author: Patricia McCarthy
Date: 1994
Language: en
Topics: drugs, Ireland, Workers Solidarity
Source: Retrieved on 18th November 2021 from http://struggle.ws/ws94/heroin43.html
Notes: Published in Workers Solidarity No. 43 — Autumn 1994.

Patricia McCarthy

The Heroin menace

DUBLIN is currently experiencing a heroin epidemic similar to the one

that hit the north and south inner-city in the late 1970s. That epidemic

left hundreds of young people hooked on heroin and dozens of them have

since died of AIDS and AIDS related diseases. Some big criminals made

fortunes out of it.

The Dunnes managed to stay at large long enough to cause devastation in

the tightly knit working class communities of the north and south inner

city. People in these areas were already devastated by high rates of

unemployment, bad housing rampant crime and a decaying environment. =

Less than half a mile from the fancy hotels and shops of the city

centre, people lived and still live in poverty and often in despair.

The massive working class bias of heroin worldwide makes it stand apart

from all other drugs whatever about its addictive quality. The lives of

a whole generation of inner city youth was blighted by the heroin

epidemic of the late 70s and early 1980s. Today young people are dying

with frightening regularity in these communities, sometimes leaving

young kids to be reared by their grandparents. This is the ultimate in

capitalist logic — young kids turning to a killer drug in their hundreds

to lessen the despair of their hopeless futures in this society.

In the early 80s, the official response to the heroin crisis was muddled

and ineffective. After all it was only the communities of the inner city

that were effected and we all know that no-one important lives there.

The community response however was much more decisive. Concerned Parents

Against Drugs (CPAD) was set up and quickly gained support in both the

north and south inner city and Ballymun where some of the pushers had

moved.

CPAD marched on the houses of known pushers and sometimes forcibly

evicted them. Pushers were denounced at public meetings and ordered to

leave the community. From the beginning there was hassle between the

CPAD and the cops. This culminated in the arrest of John Whacker

Humphreys and others who were tried in the Special Criminal Court where

there is no jury and he was sentenced to prison and taken to Portlaoise.

This hassle was partly because Sinn Fein was closely associated with the

CPAD in some areas but also because they were challenging the authority

of the cops and therefore the state in enforcing the law by doing what

the cops wouldn’t or couldn’t do.

However, there were problems with CPAD in some areas. One example was in

Crumlin where they de-generated quickly into vigilantes who took to

hassling anyone in the community who was different or lived any kind of

an alternative life-style. There was also the problem that often all

they were doing was moving the pushers from on area to another.

The biggest problem was that, in the beginning anyway, they did not

differentiate between pushers and addicts. People did not know as much

about heroin addiction then and certainly not as much about AIDS, and

there were practically no treatment programmes in existence for addicts.

CPAD sometimes did not distinguish between hard and soft drugs either.

People were harassed for smoking dope in some areas. However, despite

its very real faults, CPAD was a progressive response to the heroin

epidemic at that time.

The present situation is very different. AIDS and H.I.V. are the main

reasons that it is so different. So many families in the inner city have

had someone either die of AIDS or become H.I.V. positive that it is now

part of the community. In this situation people are reluctant to go for

the tactics of the CPAD again because it is their own brothers and

sisters and sons and daughters that would be targeted.

A revival of CPAD-type organisation seems to be happening in the south

inner city at the moment where there was a recent march to “keep our

communities free from drugs”. People do need to organise to defend their

communities from heroin, AIDS and drugs wars. However this time around

there needs to a clear distinction made between pushers and addicts.

The recent survey of H.I.V. positive people in Dublin [Building

Positively published by the Round Tower Housing Association, February

1994] shows that a very high proportion of them are either homeless or

in very bad privately rented flats, and that the biggest single reason

why they are in that state was that they had been harassed out of their

homes by vigilantes because of their drug use and because they were

H.I.V positive.

The Corporation now will not house people defined as anti-social and a

lot of drug users get defined in this way. People who are often very

sick and dying in some cases are being harassed out of their homes

because they are addicted to heroin. There is no easy solution because

addicts sometimes push drugs and sometimes are into theft to pay for

their addiction and they can make terrible neighbours. But simply

throwing them out of their homes and communities and not calling for

treatment programmes, and that means needle exchanges and methadone

maintenance centres in the area where they live, is not acceptable to

anarchists.

Heroin addicts are victims of capitalism and should not be made

scapegoats. People need to focus on the lousy conditions that create

heroin addiction and to fight and organise around them. Anarchists

believe that heroin should be decriminalised and available to addicts on

prescription. Heroin is different to most other drugs because it is used

intravenously and has led, though sharing needles, to users becoming

HIV+.

The distinction between “hard” and “soft” drugs changes all the time

with the arrival of new kinds of drugs. As anarchists the distinction we

make is between drugs that have a bad effect on users and the wider

community, and those that don’t. Heroin addiction leads to crime and

violence, and it is working class communities who have to bear the brunt

of it. It also leads to HIV infection and AIDS. It kills people. This

makes it an anti-social drug.

We are not in favour of more punitive legislation as a response. That

has changed nothing. One only has to look at the number of junkies who

go into Mountjoy jail and come out still addicted. Indeed many young

prisoners have gone in never having used heroin but come out addicted.

The state has been more concerned with appearing to do something rather

than actually doing it. It has been a case of scapegoats rather than

solutions.

Anarchists are fighting for the sort of world where nobody will ‘need’

to escape from reality through self-destructive addiction. Until this is

achieved we will support communities who want to defend themselves from

heroin pushers and anti-social behaviour.