You can tell how well the economy is doing, just by looking at how much cocaine punters are snorting. So says Dr Chris Luke.

As a consultant in emergency medicine in Mercy University Hospital (MUH) Cork for more than 30 years, he has seen it all: well-educated men who need five guards to restrain them such is their aggression from the drug; patients who have smashed glass panes from the surge of adrenalin; panicked users who swallow badly wrapped powders at the sight of police, only to drop dead 30 minutes later; and men in suits half-stripped from the heat and covered in blood after hitting out at ambulance services trying to treat them.

And as sure as night follows day, by looking at the property pages, Dr Luke can tell his job is about to get a whole lot worse. "As house prices rise so does the level of cocaine consumption," he says. "Throughout history it has always been the same.

"It was very popular in the second half of 19th Century Vienna, the Roaring Twenties in Europe and the US and famously in the 1980s era of Gordon Gekko and 'greed is good' - all as the economy peaked. But in 2008 we watched consumption fall off a cliff. Now today in Ireland, cocaine is resurging because house prices are resurging."

Given its use among the wealthy in boom times, Dr Luke believes cocaine played a role in the years leading up the crash.

"Old school people like me believe that the Wall Street crash was partly participated by hedge-fund guys and 'masters of the universe' taking cocaine. If you read the back story to it, you'll see many people saying that. A lot of these guys in Wall Street and in the City of London were off their heads half the time on cocaine."

Expand Close Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko in the film ‘Wall Street’ from the ‘greed is good’ era. / Facebook

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Asked if he feels the same happened in Ireland, he says: "Absolutely. Sure why wouldn't it? Anyone in Dublin would see people, as they get richer, taking more and more cocaine and fund managers and traders are among the city's wealthiest. Drink and drugs make people homeless. There is no reason why drink and drugs won't make people in penthouses make stupid decisions."

Latest reports show Dublin property prices are up 86pc since the crash. Concurrently, since 2010, there has been a 110pc increase in cocaine-related deaths.

But despite prices of many luxury good and services rising with the good times, cocaine use has bucked this trend. It is the only luxury item that has maintained its price (€100 per 10 lines or 1gram of cocaine) while the quality or purity of the drug has shot up - with frightening results. Most recent figures show there were 44 cocaine related deaths in one year alone (2015).

Dr Luke says purity levels are at 95pc-100pc on Ireland's streets and puts this down to three factors.

"Firstly, there is a massive surplus of cocaine at the moment because allegedly FARC revolutionaries in Columbia are producing huge amounts in advance of the major clampdown on cocaine production that will come with the political treaty; secondly, there is fierce competition between online dealers [on the dark web] and traditional dealers and thirdly, there is a shortage of the agents that they cut the powder with. The market is flooded.

"You can get drugs in any town in this country within 20 minutes. The advent of the courier and the internet and mass production of cocaine means that the whole country is easily covered. I had one very well-to-do middle-aged man in a suit who was living in the wilds of Cork. He had stuff delivered by courier and ended up spending three days in intensive care."

He has also witnessed the speed at which cocaine can kill as it takes a person through a wide spectrum of emotions.

"People can go from being incredibly verbose like a rapper on stage, right through to bulging-eye violence and to suddenly being unconscious, twitching on the ground to death and the whole process can take just minutes."

With Ireland now among the world's top five heaviest cocaine users, he puts our propensity for the drug down to logistics - the drug-trafficking routes from Columbia - our weather and most notably a long and drawn-out history of collective trauma. "I think partly it is to do with the fact that we are in the wet and grey Atlantic. But also, there was a book published recently about the legacy of the famine and how the famine gave the Irish a collective post traumatic stress disorder," he says.

Just as studies have shown that pregnant women who were traumatised by the World Trade Center attacks went on to have children who suffered from greater amounts of stress, and separate studies that found descendants of Holocaust survivors have altered stress hormones, he believes Ireland has its own emotional profile as a result of the horrors visited on our ancestors.

"If you look at anywhere there is a major conflict or war or atrocity, it takes many generations to get over it. Grandchildren remember their grandparents dying and the trauma is carried down several generations.

"We are only 150 years since millions died, millions were exported and millions were left in poverty.

"That on top of endless successive invasions and it's a pretty heavy mix of genetics."

The pull of the drug leaves no one out, he says.

"I see every walk of life. The age rage is from 15 to 58. There is no section of society that is spared but it is particularity in the middle class.

"The most striking is the very well-educated, well-paid guy in his mid-twenties in an excellent job who comes in from a party having done three or four lines and is completely berserk... they are violent against guards, security people and ambulance drivers and the next morning they are back to their remorseful middle-class selves and can't remember anything that has happened."

He has been an expert witness on many inquests, and says what people find difficult to fathom is the heavy user who drops dead from one line. "Your body is as vulnerable after 30 years of consuming it as it is if you were a total novice. First you get a euphoria, an alertness, and a sense of invincibility and physical strength, and often that is real, not just perceived strength, it's extraordinary. But then of course your heart is also racing, your blood pressure shoots up and can double to profoundly dangerous levels and if you have developed an electrical problem in your heart or a slight weakness in one of the blood vessels in your brain, it can pop, triggering a stroke or seizure and death."

He personally warned Gerry Ryan on his own radio show about the dangers of cocaine only months before the star's death, after which the DJ is said to have been aghast.

But Dr Luke says he has been in the medical profession, and has travelled around the country speaking about the dangers of cocaine, long enough to know that "people won't be told".

"They think it's an inevitable consequence but that's the worst case scenario is going to happen to someone else. They never think 'that could be me'."

Sunday Independent