Drug Outbreak or Just More Bad Stats?

Those of you out there who've touched on the humanities at some point of their academic career will probably heard the term discourse. It's a slightly nebulous academic term which roughly means that every area of discussion or debate has a set of unwritten rules governing what can and cannot be said. And while the rules may appear obvious they generally reflect the dominant ideological paradigm. In doing so 'they limit the terms of acceptable speech' (as Judith butler says)so that the very terms of the debate frame its outcome. The implication of all this is that academics are the only ones wise enough to see through all of this, which annoys me a bit. But it's a useful concept nonetheless.

Which takes us to the discourse of how drug crime is generally reported in Ireland*. Here's a very few assumptions which underpin every article you'll read on the topic - assumptions that are far from self-evident on closer examination:

• Garda estimates of street value are always correct
• The fight against drugs is not being lost. Nor is it being won.
• Some drugs are worse than others
  

Take for example Conor Lally's article of 30th December 2006 "Illegal Drugs Trade Worth 1 Billion Here" (subscriptions unfortunately needed) which extrapolates from drug seizures that the drug trade now amounts to 1m a year. As the value of a black market is never easy to estimate the method used here is that drug seizures amount to 10% of the total trade. So just take the 'street value', multiply by ten and there you are. Easy? Well not really. The 10% assumption is impossible to verify (in either being too small or too large) and it is severely unreliable to extrapolate a total trade from it. It's the kind of assumption a professional economist would get laughed out of town for if presenting a business case for building, say, a bridge.Yet when the Gardai estimate the drug trade in Ireland this seems quite legitimate and never questioned in the Irish media. Perhaps the Gardai had a great year last year and seized 30% of all drugs imported. Maybe they had a bad year and seized 5%. But we wouldn't know this, we can't ever know this the media still publishes these dicey figures as fact and never questions the assumptions.

The article cites a senior Garda source (why unnamed?) saying "while the increase in drugs seizures indicated a growing drugs trade here, it was also evidence of the success of the National Drugs Unit here." This may be true. But some might argue that a "growing drugs trade" indicates that the National Drugs Unit is not being very successful. You could also argue that "increases in drug seizures" are the sign of the National Drugs Unit being very successful and the drug trade actually decreasing. Who can tell? I honestly don't know, but the article doesn't even offer an opinion or seek out an expert who might know.

The placing of a value of €420m on the value of cannabis sold in Ireland is completely unreasonable. The most up-to-date research suggests that in the last year 5.0% of Irish 15-64 year olds have used cannabis, but only 2.6% have done so in the previous month. This demographic consists of approximately 3 million people. This implies that there are 150,000 users of cannabis in any given year. But this would mean that the €2800 worth of cannabis is consumed per user per year - and half of those users haven't even touched the stuff in the last month! My understanding of such matters is that it takes quite a bit of smoking to get through €55 of the stuff in a week, never mind the cost of tobacco. I'll politely assume that Conor Lally's ignorance of drug values is greater than this girl's, but as a journalist who writes about the area it really shouldn't be.

Further down the article mentions that only €3m of heroin was seized last year and using our magical multiple we get to an annual trade of €30m. But most recent statistics put the number of opiate-users in the country at 15,000. If we again assume that half are heroin users (which is one of the assumptions of the article which seems plausible) the figures suggest that an average heroin habit can be run for about the same price as 40 cigarettes a day! Am I the only one who notices anomalies like this?

The article also cites a source claiming that Ireland is in the early stages of a cocaine epidemic. While I don't want to resort to quoting a dictionary, an epidemic is a widespread outbreak of a serious disease where many people are at risk of infection. No one is at risk of taking cocaine if they don't want feel like it. Throughout the article there is no refutation of either Garda or NACD figures. It's pretty obvious that these are people with an ongoing professional interest in ensuring that reported drug crime is reasonably high.Quoting them without question is lazy.

There are two very interesting stories about drugs in Ireland that to my knowledge no journalist has every pursued. One is that Garda sources regularly overstate the value of drug seizures by at least 50% and anyone who even knows someone who has bought drugs on can do the math and figure this out. The other is that there are an estimated 15,000 opiate addicts in Ireland and 60% of drug-related deaths every year are heroin-related. Heroin is clearly the worst drug out there in terms of impact on users and those around them.Yet heroin-related prosecutions represent a mere 11% of the total while cannabis prosecutions (usually simple possession) account for about 55%, and have been growing. Why are Garda resources so skewed in this direction? No journalist ever asks.


*Manifesto alert. Hibernium believes in the citizen's right to imbibe any recreational drug she likes in full cognicanse of its dangers. However we don't think this is necessarily wise and certainly think that she should be financially incentivized into healthier types of fun.