Prime Time to lift the lid on drug debts and families forced to flee the country and the dealers following attacks

As Ireland records the highest number of drug treatment cases on record, a special RTÉ Prime Time report tonight asks how bad is the drug debt issue in Ireland, and can anything be done to stop it destroying lives?

Drug users are racking up tens of thousands in debts while some innocent families - who are victims of drug related intimidation - have had to flee the country. The prevalence of cocaine in every town and village is Ireland, is such that cows, tractors and farm land are being sold by farmers to pay off drug debts.

Detective Superintendent Sé McCormack of the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau said, “It is a rural phenomenon. It is an urban phenomenon. We have heard stories of people being intimidated and forced to sell property, to sell equipment, to sell machinery, to move house, all of these things in all of the different areas of the country.”

Drug related intimidation occurs when a criminal or criminals allege that a sum of money is owed as a result of a drug debt. It usually involves family members of the person in debt being subjected to intimidation or the threat of intimidation.

“Drug debts are particularly an issue with cocaine abuse, because people’s tolerance of cocaine goes up quite quickly and they can burn through quite a lot of money using cocaine,” addiction counsellor Michael Guerin told RTÉ Prime Time. “It’s everywhere. It’s in every town, city, village and rural area of the country.”

The consequences of the current high rates of cocaine use can be terrifying as people face threats and violence from drug dealers seeking repayment.

People working in addiction services have told RTÉ Prime Time some farmers have sold livestock, farm land and machinery such as tractors to pay off drug debts. It is not uncommon for a farmer to pay €50,000 to clear off a family member’s drug debt and make a drug dealer go away.

‘Alice’ - not her real name - had to flee Ireland due to intimidation and attacks on her family home. Her son started using recreational drugs when he was at secondary school which descended into addiction and drug dealing.

Long after they kicked their son out of the house, the criminal gang kept terrorising Alice’s family, who had nothing to do with drugs. “We gave him multiple chances. But in the end, and it's a terribly hard thing to do, to put your child out. We put him out because we had to consider the safety of our younger children,” 'Alice' said.

The family had to go to court and get a protection order to keep their son away from the family home. However, this did not bring an end to their ordeal. Drug dealers regularly called to their home looking for money. “My husband and I took turns at nighttime, staying up and watching the security cameras with a mobile phone in our hand, just in case we had to call the Gardaí or get out,” 'Alice' said.

The threats eventually spiralled leading to aggressive and violent attacks. “Somebody broke into the house. They smashed the interior of our house. They broke sinks off the wall, toilets off the floor, smashed TVs, they wrecked the house. It was absolutely horrifying.”

It was after this attack on her home that 'Alice' got the panicked phone call from her son telling her that their lives were under threat. “He rang the house phone, he says, ‘You've got to get out now. They're going to shoot you if you don't get out,’” she said.

Even though 'Alice' had long thrown her son out of the family home, drug dealers called to the house making threats and saying that they needed to see him. The family felt helpless and made the decision to flee Ireland.

Speaking to RTÉ Prime Time from abroad on the condition that her identity would be protected, ‘Alice’ said, “Your biggest fear, is one of your daughters is going to be snatched and raped in retaliation. Are they going to force one of your sons into being a drugs mule just to pay off his brother's debts?"

"I couldn't send my children to school. They weren't safe. They could have been pulled out of the schools or pulled off the bus anywhere. It was so, so traumatic” she added.

Some of her children were taken out of school without getting to say goodbye to their friends. 'Alice' told RTÉ Prime Time: “We left our home, careers and children's education. We had to leave everything and then not be able to tell anybody where we were going, not to give our friends a forwarding address for their safety.”

As 'Alice' left Ireland, she said she felt ashamed at what her son had done. She is haunted by the fact that her son may have inflicted pain on other people. “It’s that constant fear eats at you and it will send you insane. I remember crying as we were driving away, and I thought, it's not if, it’s when he is murdered, nobody is going to know where we are. No one is going to be able to tell me that my son is dead.”

Due to her son’s drug dealing, ‘Alice’ is now living a very different life abroad, “I wouldn't say we're happy. It's not the life we had wanted. It's a huge thing to leave everything and have to start from scratch. It's traumatic, but at the end the day, to be able to sleep at night and to be safe is huge.”

A record 13,104 cases were treated for problem drug use in Ireland last year, according to the Health Research Board (HRB). Children as young as 15 are now taking cocaine.

Conor Harris was a gifted Gaelic footballer who played with Kildare underage teams, before his life descended into chaos after he started taking cocaine when he was 17.

He started taking €50 worth of cocaine on a night out and that soon increased to €200 worth. He started selling drugs to feed his addiction. By the time he overdosed at the age of 18, he had racked up debts of €20,000. Like many people in that situation, he got a Credit Union load to try and pay off his debt. “But I went back and did the same thing again. And by the time I came out of rehab, I had a €22,500 bill to pay.”

Conor said he was constantly looking over his shoulder when he owed drug money. At one point, he was put into the back of a car and told by drug dealers that he was going to be shot if he did not repay one of the drug debts he owed to several dealers. Then his family, who have no involvement in drugs, got dragged into trouble. “I had to ring my mother and my six-year-old sister on Christmas Eve and tell them that they had to leave the house because there was people coming down to go through the house because I owed them money.”

More than 1,500 formal complaints about drug-related intimidation have been made over the last three and a half years according to figures from An Garda Síochána.

Det Supt Sé McCormack of the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau said: “The top incidents of complaint would be criminal damage would be over 550, blackmail and extortion would be over 350, murder and threats to kill or threats to cause harm would be over 200, demanding payment with menaces would be around 100, and assaults and assaults causing harm would be around 100. That's just to give you an indication of the scale of it." But as not all incidents are reported, the full scale of the problem is unknown.

Watch a special RTÉ Prime Time report “Drugs, Debts and Threats” tonight at 9.35pm on RTÉ One and RTE Player by reporter Conor McMorrow and producer Lucinda Glynn.