1,000% illicit drug mark-up will sustain the trade - Fr McVerry

Drugs sold on the streets in Ireland have a 1,000% mark-up on the price paid for them in their country of origin, prominent social campaigner Fr Peter McVerry, has claimed.

Addressing a meeting in Mayo that discussed drug and substance abuse, Fr McVerry said that the scale of money to be made from selling drugs meant that efforts to suppress the trade in illegal drugs was an impossible one.  “You can buy a kilo of cocaine in South America for €700 and sell it on the streets of Dublin for €70,000, “he claimed. 

“With profit like that there will always be people who will attempt to bring drugs into this country.”

He warned that the problem was, in fact, escalating, and that “more and more drugs and more varieties of drugs are available to young people.”

In a blunt message to parents, Fr McVerry said it was, “a problem that is not going away” and that anyone with children aged 15 or over needed to be realistic.

“I would advise all parents that they ought to presume that their child has tried drugs or alcohol or both,” he said.

He linked the growing abuse of drugs and alcohol by young people to the attitudes to alcohol that older generations of Irish people have had.

“This is a problem that we adults have contributed to and we adults have to change our behaviour and our attitude if we are to try and help young people to stay off drugs and to use alcohol sensibly,” Fr McVerry declared.  “The whole problem of drug misuse which is very much related to the problem of alcohol misuse has clearly spread to every town in Ireland.”

The only hope of dealing with the problem was communication, he went on.

“We simply have to keep open the lines of communication, not judging the person, not rejecting or condemning, rather affirming their values, listening to them and trying to support them in an appropriate way.”

Fr McVerry said that he believed that many young people who developed drug or drink problems were often “running away from something, like bullying at school, expectations from a parent or favourite aunt or uncle that they will succeed in school.” 

“They feel that they can’t live up to those expectations so they feel a failure and they may be using alcohol or drugs to suppress those feelings.”

“Many of the young people I deal with,  who have a serious drug misuse problem, are using drugs to run away from childhood experiences and from the negative feelings  associated  with those childhood experiences, running away from something that you as parents you may not be aware of.”

by Fintan Deere