Attitudes to drug addiction need to be challenged

If there's one thing that unites Northside and Southside communities across Dublin, it is the scourge of drug addiction.

For every Darndale - as featured in TV3's controversial new series - there is an estate with mirror image problems in Tallaght, Clondalkin or Ballyfermot. Even supposedly affluent areas like Dun Laoghaire have residents battling heroin addiction. Tenants living in inner city flat complexes on both sides of the Liffey have seen more than their fair share of drug-related funerals.

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Talk to any of Dublin's homeless and you'll most likely find addiction at the heart of their situation. RTÉ's recent series on women behind bars told a similar story.

TV3's 'Darndale: The Edge of Town' documentary has been a major talking point online and on radio shows. While gritty and uncompromising, it has been praised as an honest portrayal of the social problems of the area. Its critics argue that it has done the community a disservice by relying too heavily on stereotypes - the drug addicts; the single parents; the urban cowboys on horseback; the bored teenagers riding around the park on scrambler bikes.

Within minutes of the first episode going on air, it was trending on Twitter. The trolls got to work immediately, plumbing new depths of ignorance and snobbery. Every harrowing story depicted in the documentary was met with a mixture of mock outrage and pure contempt for the suffering of the contributors. The emotional detachment exhibited by some people was staggering, tweeting as if they were referring to fictional characters from Roddy Doyle's Barrytown instead of real life human beings.

That's the problem with social media - it can desensitise and dehumanise individuals who, under normal circumstances, would not express such hateful sentiments. And while there was a degree of support for the Darndale community, the overall impression on Twitter was that there was little sympathy for those struggling with drug addiction. Likewise, some of the commentary about single mothers living on social welfare was highly derogatory.

There were times when the programme strayed into sensationalist, tabloid television territory. But for all its flaws, TV3's series deserves credit for highlighting the sense of hopelessness felt by heroin addicts and their abandonment by successive governments.

We got an insight into life on methadone, the heroin substitute that allows chronic users to swap one addiction for another; a sticking plaster solution designed to stop addicts from committing crimes to feed their habit. In reality, methadone only benefits polite society. People with drug problems can languish on a maintenance programme for years due to a shortage of detox beds. Some will die before ever getting the opportunity to be drug-free.

Ask any heroin addict and they will all tell you the same thing: they want to be off drugs; they want to stop causing their loved ones pain and hardship; they want a chance to start again and make a positive contribution to society. But most of them can't even begin to think about quitting because the power of their addiction is all-consuming; it is too big a part of them.

Those of us lucky enough not to struggle with drug addiction can't understand it. We feel afraid when we see heroin users, sometimes with good reason. Not all addicts come from local authority estates or dilapidated flats. Some have middle-class backgrounds but made a catastrophic error of judgement by trying heroin, perhaps out of boredom or due to peer pressure. Now they find themselves on the fringes of society, labelled as junkie lowlife by a judgemental, uncaring community.

Rather than demonise all drug users, perhaps it's time we attempted to understand the many complex issues surrounding heroin addiction. Those who are trying to quit need to be given as much support as possible. Providing addicts with easier access to detox programmes is the way forward but it requires State investment and political will.

And while we should all rightly be intolerant of drugs, uninformed views about addiction only serve to make a bad situation worse.