Women injecting cocaine have had legs amputated......sort of

this was in fridays IT. a story about cocaine which is now apparently the new heroin to the media. the latest drug according to them anyway destroying our communities and with plenty of scope for salacious horror stories.

i think the beauty of cocaine use to certain media people is that it allows them to write about hubris... lots of celtic tiger cubs reaping the whirlwind from their consumerist/materialist or secularist lifestyles. and allows them to bemoan the (alleged) fall of family values, religion or ''community'' and/or the selfishness of our liberal/neo-liberal society.

like a lot of these drug stories there's lots of anecdote and assertions but not much actual reportage. this piece basically just repeats statements made at a ''conference on cocaine use'' with some opinion from the reporter thrown in. and also as usual it reports as effects of drug use effects which should be more readily laid at the illegality of drugs.

anyway to the title of the piece. you might wonder how many women had their legs amputated?

"At the moment, we have one amputee on our programme, but we have seen a number of others."

one. but they have seen a number of others. so how does cocaine use result in leg amputation? indirectly it turns out as they result from the use of dirty needles....

"There is a huge health problem among the client group we work with, a big rise in HIV infection rates, particularly a lot of abscesses, and more recently, for the first time in the 12 years I've been working in Saol, a number of amputations have happened because of blood clots and septicaemia from cocaine use."

the same as heroin incidentally but needle exchanges can't be offered or letting them buy new ones is out 'cause the government fears that might encourage it. so we had the same thing with heroin and now (apparently) with cocaine but there'll be no change in policy presumably because that might result in fewer horror stories with which to scare nice middle class kiddies. fewer HIV infections and other disgusting ailments. instead we'll go with ''drugs are baad, m'kay''.

next we have...

"And if it's not cocaine use it's family members involved in cocaine use, and there's families in huge debt, there are young people under severe threat, threat of life and limb, threat of death. Families are having to go out and borrow money. The whole area is absolutely swamped with cocaine," she told the conference.

''threat of life and limb'' once again because it's illegal and therefore the trade ends up in the hands of the most ruthless and violent. duh

other problems with the piece, assertions....

"In the community where I work in the north inner city of Dublin every street and almost every house has been affected by cocaine," Ms Byrne said.

Dr Brion Sweeney, a consultant psychiatrist working with the HSE's addiction services, told delegates that the State's response to the cocaine problem had been too slow and that the drug barons were winning the battle.

and

''The whole area is absolutely swamped with cocaine''

this bit...''that the drug barons were winning the battle'' is just priceless as it implies that our poor innocent children are being led astray by drug barons and if they didn't exist no-one would take drugs.

if anyone's wondering why i'm being so hard on people who are trying to help their fellow citizens it's this quote....

"We constantly struggle for funding. We do not have enough staff . . . we try to manage . . . A lot of my time is spent searching for funding when it should be spent actually delivering the service."

...that makes me think that a lot of these stories are are trotted out in an effort to squeeze money out of government. also illogical thinking annoys me