Cocaine in Rural Ireland: The Quiet Problem in Small Towns

A man rang me last winter from a car park outside a village in the midlands. He had driven eleven miles to make the call, because in his own town there is nowhere you can sit in a car and talk without somebody knocking on the window to ask are you alright.

That call tells you almost everything about cocaine in rural Ireland. Not that it is here — anyone living in a small town already knows it is here. But that the thing which makes rural life good, the fact that everybody knows you, is the exact thing that keeps people silent for years longer than they need to be.

I work with people all over the country, and a large share of them are not from Dublin or Cork at all. They are from parishes with one pub, one pitch and one chemist. So let me say the quiet part first: this is not a city problem that has leaked out to the country. It is a country problem now, in its own right, with its own shape.

How cocaine reached every small town in Ireland

People imagine there was some moment it arrived. There was not. A few things simply lined up.

The first is that the supply changed. Cocaine is no longer something you have to go into a city to find, and it does not require you to know anybody dodgy. It is ordered by phone and it is delivered, to the door, to the car park, to the end of the lane, in places where the postman would struggle to find you. Rural distance used to be a protection. It stopped being one.

The second is that it got cheap enough to become ordinary. Not cheap — nobody who has added up a year of it would call it cheap — but cheap enough per night that a lad on decent money never has to make a real financial decision about it. When something costs about the same as a round, it stops feeling like a drug and starts feeling like part of the night.

The third is that rural Ireland runs on drink and always has. The pub is the community centre, the funeral, the christening, the match, the meeting place. Cocaine attaches itself to drinking so easily that most people I work with never decided to start. They just kept going one Saturday, and then again, and then a third time, and it was in the routine before it was ever a choice.

And the fourth is the one nobody wants to name. There is very little to do. In a small town in November, when the evenings are black at half four and the nearest anything is forty minutes away, a weekend that lifts you out of yourself is worth a lot. I have written about that mechanism in boredom and cocaine, and it is not a small factor here. It is often the whole engine.

What makes rural use different

The drug is the same everywhere. The circumstances around it are not.

In a city you can use for years in near anonymity. Nobody in your apartment block knows your mother. In a small town, everything you do is witnessed — and yet, strangely, almost nothing is ever said. People notice you are thin, or short-tempered, or absent from the club, or that you were seen at four in the morning. They notice and they say nothing, because saying something would mean naming it in front of people you will still be standing beside at Mass in twenty years.

So it grows in a peculiar space: fully visible, and completely unspoken. That is why families in rural Ireland so often say they had no idea, when in truth half the parish had an idea and none of them had a way to say it. If that is you looking in at somebody, helping someone who uses cocaine is written for exactly that position.

The other big difference is the driving. Almost everything rural involves a car. There is no last bus, no taxi rank, no walking home. That means people drive to get it, drive after using it, and drive the following morning still well below par, on roads that are dark and narrow and forgiving of nothing. I have set the risk out properly in cocaine and driving, and I would ask you to read it, because losing a licence in the country does not just cost you a licence. It costs you your work, your kids' school run and every bit of independence you have.

The privacy problem, and why it keeps people using

Here is the sentence I hear more than any other from rural clients: I cannot walk into that building.

They mean the local service, or the meeting in the parish hall, or the GP whose receptionist was in their sister's class. It is not paranoia. In a town of two thousand people, your car parked outside a particular door on a Tuesday evening is information, and information travels. So people wait. They wait until the problem is undeniable, which usually means until something has already broken — a job, a marriage, a court date, a health scare.

I want to be honest about the cost of that waiting, and also honest about the solution, because the solution has genuinely changed in the last few years. Confidential help no longer requires you to be seen anywhere. A private online session from your own kitchen, or from your van in a lay-by if that is what it takes, is now completely normal. Nobody sees your car. Nobody sees you. This is how most of my rural clients work with me, and it is the single biggest thing that has shifted for people living in small places.

The shame piece underneath it is worth naming too. Rural Ireland is a place where reputation is real currency, and the fear of being found out often frightens people more than the drug does. That fear is doing more damage than the parish ever would. I have written about it at length in cocaine and shame, because until that loosens, nothing else moves.

Who I actually see from rural Ireland

Not who you would expect, if your picture of a cocaine problem comes off the television.

Farmers, and more of them every year — men working alone in all weather with prices they cannot control, debt they cannot talk about and a level of isolation most people would not last a week in. Tradesmen and lads on the sites, which has its own pattern that I have covered in cocaine on the sites. Publicans and hospitality staff. Nurses and guards. GAA players, plenty of them, often the fittest men in the parish. Business owners in their forties and fifties who have been at it quietly since their twenties and assumed they had it under control because it never cost them a day's work.

What they have in common is that they are all functioning, all respected locally, and all convinced their situation is uniquely embarrassing. It is not. It is the most ordinary story in my week.

Getting help when you live twenty miles from anywhere

There is more available than people in small towns believe. It is just badly signposted.

• The HSE Drugs and Alcohol Helpline, 1800 459 459. Free, confidential, no name needed, and they will tell you what exists in your own county. This is the lowest-risk first move there is, and you can make it from a field.
• Your local HSE drug and alcohol service. Every region has one, and drugs.ie lists services by county along with straight information. Many now offer phone and video appointments, which removes the car-outside-the-door problem entirely.
• Your GP. Bound by confidentiality, and a medical certificate never has to state a reason. If your own practice feels too close to home, you are entitled to see a different one.
• Meetings, including online ones. Cocaine Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous both run online meetings in Ireland, which solves the being-seen problem and the distance problem at once. A look at what the different support groups are like may help you pick.
• Private one-to-one help, online. That is what I do — confidential sessions by video, wherever you are in the country or abroad, evenings included. No waiting list, no building to walk into, nobody local involved at any point.

If you are weighing up the options in general, cocaine addiction help in Ireland lays out the full picture, and whether you can quit on your own is an honest look at when self-managing is realistic and when it is not.

The first honest step

You do not have to announce anything to the parish. You do not have to walk into any building. You do not have to tell a soul in your own town until you decide you want to.

You do have to tell one person somewhere, because secrecy is the thing keeping this alive, and in rural Ireland the secrecy is nearly always heavier than the drug. It can be a helpline at eleven at night. It can be a stranger on a video call. It can be your brother in the car on the way home from a match.

The men and women I see turn this around are not stronger than you. They just got honest with somebody about six months earlier than they wanted to. If you are not sure whether you are there yet, am I addicted to cocaine will tell you more than another Sunday of promising yourself that Monday is different — or take the confidential three-minute self-assessment. Nothing is stored, and nobody sees it but you.

Related reading

• Cocaine Addiction Help in Ireland: A Clear Guide to Your Options
• Cocaine and Loneliness: The Loop That Keeps You Using
• Cocaine on the Sites: Use in Construction and the Trades

Gary Clinton

Ireland's cocaine addiction specialist — CBT-qualified therapist, bestselling author of Never Give Up, and in long-term recovery himself. Private one-to-one help for professionals, online and worldwide.