Children who take drugs (Ireland)

[Lunar Loops]

This from today's Irish Independent:

Children who take drugs

THE cases come to our attention in newspaper reports of court cases or individual tragedies.
Gardai raid a cocaine mixing factory in Clondalkin and discover two 15-year-old boys in charge. A teenager, high on ecstasy tablets, gouges his own eye out at a party. An inner city drug dealer is jailed for 12 years and the court is told he used vulnerable teenagers as pawns.
Parents take out barring orders against their drug addict children in order to avoid eviction.
A 17-year-old Dublin girl, a drug addict, is charged with loitering in a public place with intent to solicit for prostitution. A 16-year-old homeless boy, an addict since he was 13, begs to be taken in to St Patrick's Institution for Christmas.
A 16-year-old boy, whose heroin addiction caused him to attack his father and wreck his family home, is arrested. An 18-year-old who escaped from a drug treatment centre in Portarlington is jailed for five years for various crimes.
Individually, the cases evoke shock and dismay, sometimes pity.
Collectively they add up to a growing scourge that, if it remains uncurbed, has the potential to destroy whole generations.
A few years ago, a study by the Garda Research Unit in Templemore found that one in four Irish teenagers had experimented with drugs.
Before that, a Southern Health Board investigation had put the ratio at one in five.
We report today that a sweeping survey on the welfare of Irish children reveals that two out of every five children in this country have taken drugs.
Further, the massive report from the Office of the Minister for Children tells us that the percentage of girls who have used an illicit drug at some time has increased dramatically in recent years. And, in a survey of 36 countries, Irish children have the third highest levels of illicit drug use.
Tomorrow's report will cover 50 different aspects of our children's lives and the news is not all bad.
For example, Irish youngsters love their sports and this is reflected in superior physical fitness compared to other countries.
However, even given the difficulty of compiling statistical data in a difficult area such as drug-taking by children, the trend is clear, relentless and genuinely frightening.Young women as targets.

[Evil GIR]

A teenager, high on ecstasy tablets, gouges his own eye out at a party.

Bullshit, sorry but some how I don't believe that, but i guess all those anti drug Nazis will say anything about the so called scourge of drugs.

[Abrad]

Originally Posted by dib

Bullshit, sorry but some how I don't believe that, but i guess all those anti drug Nazis will say anything about the so called scourge of drugs.

I believe this is referring to an incident which happened quite close to SWIM several years ago. There was a batch of pills circulating which contained DOB. They were responsible for a lot of overdoses including this one where a guy
gouged his eyes out with a screwdriver. Of course the media blamed the incident on MDMA.

Here is a warning issued by the Department of Health shortly afterwards and a news article can be read here.

[enquirewithin]

The drug causes severe psychotic episodes with serious consequences for users. In Galway a young man drove into a wall after taking the drug, believing he was sailing on a river. Gardai also suspect that DOB may have been involved in the case of Alan Smith, who gouged out his eye in September.

Suspect-- what evidence is there? Both cases sound like fabrications to me. What's this DOB Madness?

[Nagognog2]

Some of these zealots would gouge out their own eyes and claim they had taken MDMA - if God told them to. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

After that, and a stay in the local psycho-ward, they'd need the very drug they worked so feverishly to ban to overcome their own feelings of guilt.

[podge]

Swim also heard about this story when it happened , it terrified a lot of potential X users into thinking that one pill could cause you to tear your eyes out. A friend of swims took these and he recalls them being very "weird". The irish really hadnt even heard of dob at the time....most still havent. Obviously if someone expects a few hours buzzing and is hurled into a powerfull psychedelic trip without warning then things are going to be unpredictable. Apparently the boy who tore his eyes out thought he had rats in his head and he wanted to get them out. Another victim of the war on drugs. R.i.p .