Cocaine use is now widespread across Ireland. I know that’s a sentence you’ve heard trotted out many times over the years. And while such headlines are often splashed across newspapers for dramatic effect, it’s a perennial statement that actually seems to be as relevant now in Ireland as it ever was.

The Irish Times published a story last week quoting gardaí, medical experts and drug treatment officers claiming that cocaine is no longer the clichéd white-collar recreational drug of choice. In fact “farmers and nurses” are now apparently as likely to be sniffing the white stuff as much as the Dublin financier, it reported. The mind boggles.

It would be unfair of me to be broad-brush judgemental about the professions cited, but using those three as examples of the wide span of professions whose workers snort coke, farmers, nurses and financiers undoubtedly need clear heads to operate their day job to a reasonable standard.

Therefore what on earth possesses anybody with even an ounce of sense to go down the cocaine road? Or am I, as somebody who has never smoked a joint let alone seen or been offered any illicit drug in my life, just naïve?

I don’t think so, because I’m yet to come across any evidence that a line of coke now and again is any way, shape or form, “harmless”.

And I’ve yet to come across any person who is oblivious to all the negativity and dangers associated with cocaine. Society can never legislate for other people’s foolish decision making.

Still, how is that in 2019, there are educated people, for example, farmers in rural Ireland whom I thought had sense, making that calculated decision for the very first time to buy cocaine?

They are buying cocaine while still knowing its excessive cost, knowing it is illegal, knowing it keeps gangland criminals in business, knowing it’s never pure and bulked with other poisons, knowing it can kill, knowing it can result in severe depression, knowing it’s addictive, knowing it can impair judgement and knowing that it has to be consumed secretly by shoving it up your nose. Surely people have not become so detached from the real world that they actually don’t know this?

Or on the contrary, maybe there’s the probability that indeed they are well aware of all the above but don’t care and especially don’t care what anybody else thinks. Maybe realising how risqué it is on so many fronts, not least in its illegality is a high in itself. Nothing would surprise me anymore.

So, one could deduce that by the time you buy next week’s edition of this newspaper, the anecdotes as referred to in that Irish Times report last week would suggest that there’s a pretty good chance there are people not far from where you live who’ll make that decision to go to the trouble to find a way to buy themselves some cocaine to snort for the very first time.

This is despite all the warnings; reports, death and destruction associated with this seedy business. In an age where drunk driving, smoking and no doubt sooner rather than later even buying a plastic bottle of water is frowned upon, the return to Celtic Tiger levels of snorting cocaine is as disturbing as it is perplexing.

If you need cocaine to keep you going, you obviously have bigger issues which need seeing to.