Cocaine sniffers can’t talk about supporting the environment

The Irish Times on Saturday carried a story titled 'Irish drugs trade grows its links with Colombia'.

The article, written by Conor Lally, describes how Irish criminals have become embedded in the Colombian cocaine trade and of the changing times in the Irish drug trade.

A kilogram of cocaine in Ireland costs €40,000.

Below is an excerpt from the informative article.

Garda Assistant Commissioner  Justin Kelly has recently returned from Colombia. He says more Irish criminals are relocating there to act as brokers for gangs.

Assistant Commissioner Justin Kelly says when he was in Colombia, police and other officials there “cannot believe” how “disconnected” European drug users are from the human and environmental cost of growing the coca crops used to make cocaine.

One kilo of cocaine required 400kg of coca leaf to produce. That production process, pre kilo, used “274 kilo of gasoline” and potassium permanganate, a chemical used as legal medicine, often for the treatment of wounds. Kelly said the waste from the cocaine production process was “being dumped into the rivers, some of them in the Amazon basin”. There was also 230,000 hectares being used to grow coca in Colombia and much of that space had been acquired through deforestation, which had caused “irreversible” environmental damage.

He said some people in Ireland “were driving their electric vehicles and had their eco credentials with their shopping” and yet they were also taking cocaine, which was “absolutely destroying” much of the environment in Colombia. Furthermore, many of the same people in Ireland would espouse human rights-based views but were disconnected from the fact human rights activists in South America were being murdered for opposing narco groups.

“It’s directly related to the drugs that people are taking here and the Colombians, the ones I met, just cannot believe there’s a disconnect,” he said.