Drugs and students have, and perhaps always will have undeniable proximity. The combination of forbidden fruit shrouded in legend and recently liberated largely affluent youngsters is a potent one. Dublin’s students form a complex subset of a wider drug scene, with a mixture of regular, casual, legal-only, and non-users, who all express hugely varying reactions to the drugs that circulate in Dublins nightclubs and colleges alike.
The purpose of this feature is not to offer opinion or pass judgment, but instead it hopes to offer you, the reader, a broader overview of the relationship between drugs and students, by means of detailing the stories of some students who have experienced its intricacies first hand. All of those I interviewed either are or were Trinity College students, but, for a whole host of obvious reasons, any other personal details have been changed to protect their identities. Here are their stories
Matthew and his friends take mephedrone, cocaine, MDMA and ketamine on a regular basis. Although Matthew admits, there was more consistency to the party scene last year due mainly, he asserts, to the widespread popularity of mephedrone, he is adamant that sure, more people did it when you could buy bath-salts over the counter, but there are other ways of getting it. People are maybe doing it less often now, but I wouldn’t say there are fewer people doing it. He says that buying drugs like cannabis is extremely easy with places like canada dispensary online, meaning you can get it delivered straight to your door.
Matthew first took mephedrone aged 16 in a nightclub in his home town, something which he labels a little overwhelming at first, but after a few weeks I could handle it and then it was well, amazing. Over the next few years, Matthew tells me he rarely turned anything down, and by the time he arrived at college, he had tried everything that he had wanted to. Powders became his drugs of choice and, whereas his preference used to be for cocaine and mephedrone, it is now more for MDMA and ketamine. Matthew confesses that he would seldom venture on a night out without a bag of something to keep us going.
I asked Matthew whether he thought he and his friends took drugs too often, or whether he believed they were living very dangerously by taking the amounts that they did. He smiled at me, shook his head, and took a deep breath before answering. Listen, he said, I have friends who smoke 30 cigarettes a day and drink themselves to sleep regularly, and, to be honest, I think they are living just as dangerous as me. Just because the drugs I take are illegal, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are any more harmful. I am happy with the belief that I can handle what I take.
Martha told me that she first encountered pills as legal-highs and subsequently decided that she felt comfortable enough with the effects that they had on her that she decided to try illegal pills. In the company of her closest friends, in the ideal environment of a music festival, she tells me that she had the time of her life. At festivals, in an emergency, you know they won’t be any potentially embarrassing trips to the hospital, only a short journey to a medical van, where the staff are expecting you rather than judging you. It is also the kind of place where friends who haven’t tried drugs before, decide to, and so it becomes a much nicer experience, with fewer friends passing judgment and more joining in.
I asked Martha to describe to me what taking pills felt like once you feel it your head quickly begins to feel completely detached from your body. You walk around a grimy nightclub or a grubby campsite, and it seems the most exciting and interesting place in the world. The whole thing is accompanied by a constant and extreme sense of this being the most fun you have ever had or the happiest you’ve ever been. Music and dancing its hard to describe how much fun it is and how energetic you are listening to music and dancing when you’re on pills. You wouldn’t do it somewhere you knew there wouldn’t be music.
Having discussed what Martha would consider the positives, she also graphically described to me the power of a bad come-down and, particularly, one that was so bad it made her decide to stop taking pills. She described the come-down in question as beginning with an all-encompassing feeling of dread that is difficult to describe like waking up from a nightmare and that feeling of horror not going away and that this feeling of dread gripped her just as everyone else was heading home after Trinity Ball. Martha looked visibly distressed telling this tale:
I felt that I couldn’t go home, my body and head ached and myself and my boyfriend who was in a similar state genuinely considered finding a doorway in town to collapse in. We eventually dragged ourselves back to a friend’s house, but they wouldn’t answer the door, so we collapsed on the porch. Neither of us could sleep, but we couldn’t talk either; eventually, we were let in, and we took over the friend’s younger sibling’s bedroom for the next couple of days. What was to come was something I felt I truly couldn’t deal with: vomiting all day for two days without being able to sleep
The mental stuff is as bad as the physical, you’re disgusted with yourself for being in that state, you all sit around, the mates who you were having so much fun with days earlier, disgusted at each other, without the ability to talk, or eat. In bed with my boyfriend, we didn’t want to touch each other, there was no question of spooning or cuddling a depression takes over you that finds comfort in absolutely nothing. She remembers her friend’s younger sibling coming in after the second day and asking what the hell is wrong with these people? and eventually, she made it home. There was no thought of work or college, I just wanted to sleep, and it took three or four days to come back to reality. There were exams to be studied for which I eventually failed. The consequences were annoying, but the experience was horrific. If I had had to deal with that in a tent at a festival, I would have been suicidal. It was 100% not worth it.
Luke started smoking cannabis regularly when he moved into a house with friends in his second year at college. I joined a cannabis business social network and learnt all about the different cannabis products that I could buy. I didn’t notice until a friend asked me when the last night I hadn’t smoked weed was, and I honestly couldn’t remember. Having fostered a serious habit over six months, Luke began trying to quit, which took him a further six months. Weed is a sneaky drug. It is the kind of drug that you don’t notice its effects until you stop smoking it. It wasn’t until I was trying to quit and could, at first, only force myself to go two or three days without it, that I finally saw how unsociable I had become; only spending time with those, I smoked with, often going days on end without leaving the house.
I lost touch with so many good friends, through laziness for sure, but also a scary, emerging selfishness, but when I was smoking, I didn’t care. I had slowly lost the ability to socialize properly; I struggled for words quite often. I felt idiocy creeping up on me. I lost track of college work completely and ended up failing exams. At stages, I felt that my life was in complete chaos, and I would be terrified, but then I’d smoke and would be encompassed by that hazy false calm. Mostly I would associate any panic with the need to smoke, and so I would, rather than face the real problems that smoking had created in the first place.
John smokes cannabis everyday and has done for years. Throughout my interview with him, he was inflexible regarding any suggestion of either supposed or proven medical side effects of cannabis abuse. As far as John is concerned, smoking weed is good for you, and I have no idea why everyone doesn’t do it. I warned John that people might label him as something of a stereotype or not take him particularly seriously because of these views (a warning delivered because I was beginning to label him as a stereotype and not take him seriously). Still, John kept talking and, to give him credit, he was utterly engaging, and I began to find myself listening absorbedly once more.
John first smoked cannabis at 14, but didn’t start smoking it regularly until his late teens. He tells me that he was diagnosed with ADHD during secondary school and, although he doesn’t claim to smoke for medicinal purposes, he insists his condition has improved since he began regularly getting high. John attributes both his stress-free philosophy and his profound artistic nature to his cannabis habit and, again, to give him credit, both are highly evident during our interview. I asked John firstly whether he thinks he will ever stop smoking cannabis and, secondly, whether he would like his children to smoke. He answered me with a wry smile, do you know I’m not sure I ever will quit. But I am sure I do not have any children there’s only one thing more expensive than weed in Dublin, and that’s babies.
