Crack cocaine in the Dublin region - Health Research Board

3.4 Marketing crackFour interviewees referred to the ‘marketing’ of crack by dealers. Marketing tacticsinclude encouraging heroin users to take up crack use by refusing them heroin, citinga ‘drought’ (lack of availability of heroin at the time), and offering crack. It is alsoreported that some dealers offer first-time customers (in particular, sex workers) freecrack in order to promote their habit:Well I have asked actually a couple of the girls in the area, who live in this area, who saythat they don’t have a crack problem but they’re constantly being asked do they want it.And when they try and source heroin, they’re being offered crack in the absence of heroin.And so, anecdotally, a couple of the girls here, one girl in particular would say that it isbeginning to become a problem in that when she’s trying to source heroin, she’s being offeredcrack instead.north-inner city, service provider (November 2007)Another marketing strategy includes dealing in ‘party packs’, where crack is sold incombination with other drugs such as heroin, cocaine, ecstasy or cannabis:They’re going around now with party packs with crack, heroin and tablets inside of it, do youknow and they are selling them, they are selling them for 50 and 100 quid a go.north-inner city, service provider (September 2007)Crack dealers may also target known drug users outside methadone clinics:But like they are being asked you know a lot of the time they’re being offered stuff free andthen if they take it free they pay huge amounts of money afterwards for it you know. So, theyseem to be targeted, they certainly are targeting people who are known drug users who maynot be actively using for some time, and they’re just slowly tempted…north-inner city, drug-treatment service (October 2007)I was hoping to get off that clinic. I starting cutting myself down on my methadone and theyare asking me why… and I was just saying because I felt like it. It was just I want away fromwhere I am. Because like even over at P… Street you can get rock, you’re asked ‘are youlooking for gear, do you want any tablets? Any pills? Do you want any crack? I have lovelypowder’. You know you get a pain in your bollocks with it. And I think it’s like a big magnet.I really do. I just want away from P… Street. I really do.north-inner city, current crack user (October 2007)Dealers may also entice young buyers by marketing crack as ‘smokeable’ cocaine.It’s also a significant increase in the number of young people that are actually using from asearly as – as young as 13, 14. They are smoking it and you know trying to get them wise toit because it is sold to them as coke, it is not sold to them as crack.north-inner city, service provider (November 2007)Crack cocaine in the Dublin region: an evidence base for a crack cocaine strategy47