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Life

30th Nov 2015

PIC: Cocaine is incredibly popular in Ireland according to recent research by the UN

Interesting stuff from the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)

Paul Moore

Interesting stuff from the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

You may remember the recent article that expressed just how dangerously addictive alcohol is but it seems that there’s another illegal drug that’s becoming increasingly popular in Ireland, according to research by the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

The office recently published data on the number of people treated for drug abuse, as well as what the drugs were, and they discovered that Ireland  has one of the world’s highest ratios of cocaine use, relative to the overall population .

The drugs in the survey were grouped into the following categories (note that alcohol isn’t included)

  • Cannabis
  • Cocaine
  • Solvents and inhalants
  • Opioids: heroin, opium, pharmaceutical opioids
  • Amphetamine-type stimulants: methamphetamine, amphetamine, ecstasy, prescription stimulants
  • Tranquilizers and sedatives: benzodiazepines, barbiturates
  • Hallucinogens: LSD and others

It seems that Ireland is the ninth heaviest users of cocaine per person as seen in these graphs below.

Drugs Graph

You can ascertain more information from the interactive map here but there are two other interesting statistics in relation to Ireland’s consumption of drugs.

The average ratio of people treated for drug abuse in Ireland is 2523.8 people per 1 million while there are 54.5 deaths due to an overdose per 1 million people.