If you take cocaine you’re as culpable for young Keane’s gruesome murder as any drug gang

FOR most of us, almost anaesthetised at this stage to the tit-for-tat killings that have marked drug wars in this country for many years now, the abduction and killing of Keane Mulready-Woods still represented a new low of savagery.

He was not a kingpin of the illegal trade, and barely even a footsoldier. He was just a 17-year-old, a boy, perhaps easily enthralled by what he saw as the pickings on offer, and cruelly exploited by those who detected that weakness within him.

In the area of sexual abuse, we hear a lot about grooming, but young men are groomed by drugs gangs, too – seduced by the prospect of owning designer gear, of fast cars, of being part of the gang, of being respected by their peers and feared by others.

In the wake of his murder and the gruesome dismemberment and discovery of his remains, chucked out of a car in a bin bag and burned in a car with evil disdain for the fact this was a human life, there has been much public outrage – and not a little ill-judged comment.

You don’t have to look too far to see such messages. Out of respect for his family, whose agony is surely incomprehensible, I won’t repeat some of what I’ve heard and seen, but let’s just say the conclusion for many is that when you’re part of that world, a world in which life is cheap and turf wars are part of the deal, you have to expect what you get.

Addicts

This is a convenient get-out for many, because it absolves them of having to deal with the crucial central issue – there would be no drug war if there was no drug market. Drug gangs don’t make their millions by selling to their members, or just to heroin addicts wandering the streets in a numbing cloud that relieves their daily pain.

Drug gangs make their money by selling to everyone, and cocaine is the drug of choice. Last October, the Health Research Board newsletter warned that cocaine use had returned to Celtic Tiger levels. More pertinently, it said the profile of users had changed.

In 2007, it was the middle classes, passing around lines of coke after everyone was done with the cheeseboard at dinner parties, or less than surreptitiously in the bathrooms of trendy bars and nightclubs.

Now, though, cocaine has spread across the entire country and across all social groups. One garda told The Irish Times that the average consumer was ‘a farmer or a nurse. Actually, there isn’t an average consumer. It’s universal. That’s how bad it is.’ The Donegal Democrat reported that the drug problem in Letterkenny was ‘rampant’. The Western People warned that ‘cocaine use in Mayo was threatening to spiral out of control’. The Wexford People reported that there was a 160% increase in people seeking treatment for cocaine use between 2012 and 2018.

Check your local newspaper or listen to your local radio station, and you will surely see that pattern repeated everywhere.

There was a time when admitting to drug taking, beyond maybe the occasional drag on a cannabis joint when you were a student, was taboo. Now, no one seems to care.

Dr Jason van der Velde, an emergency medicine specialist in west Cork, also told The Irish Times: ‘Before, people who came into emergency departments were quite cagey about how they got injured. Now they quite openly say, “I was off my head on cocaine and this is what happened”.’

Of course, part of the problem is that drug use and drug dealing have been glamorised. You often see on film classifications that where once they mostly warned of bad language, nudity and sexual scenes, there now is a warning about ‘frequent drug use’.

Disgusting

This is fine when a film such as Trainspotting, with a character sticking his head down a disgusting toilet to retrieve opium suppositories, shows us the depths to which addiction can take its victims – less so when The Wolf Of Wall Street, designed as a modern morality tale, instead left much of its audience enamoured of the spurious glamour of cocaine and sex which are often seen in movies as two sides of the same coin.

For the drug dealers, gritty shows that the rest of the population watches in horror have, it seems, tragically become training manuals. Love/Hate reflected the gang wars in Dublin, and it was often said the safest time to be on the streets in Ireland was between 9.30 and 10.30 on a Sunday night, because gang members all were glued to it.

But then along comes a show such as Netflix’s Narcos, based on Pablo Escobar and the drug trade in Colombia, and it’s hard not to see how it became almost a training manual for those who nefariously operate in that shady world.

Certainly, if you had told me this time last week about a boy being abducted, tortured and dismembered and asked where I thought it had happened, my first thought would have been Mexico or South America.

Drogheda? It wouldn’t have crossed my mind.

So here we are, in 2020, facing a new decade that has already brought fresh horror, a murder so unspeakably evil it is hard to comprehend the fact that such savages walk among us. That they do so, though, is because anyone who buys cocaine facilitates them, and he or she happily and passively turns a blind eye because they like that little toot, that little pick-me-up for the weekend, that hit snorted through a rolled-up €5 note.

Underworld

Yes, sick individuals murdered that 17-year-old boy, without compassion or humanity. It remains irrefutable, though, that he would not be dead if there was no illegal drug trade at all.

So if you’re that farmer or nurse, or a barrister or a CEO, a hairdresser or, yes, a journalist, and you take out your mirror and your credit card this weekend, and you cut a little bag of cocaine and line it up as once you lined up toast soldiers to dip in your boiled egg when you, too, were just a child, then you have no business saying that this boy knew what he was getting into and that’s the way the criminal underworld works.

Why not? Because you, just as surely as a rival drug gang, killed Keane Mulready-Woods too.