Premiere of Pushers Out -The Story of the Inner City Drug Epidemic of the 1980s
national |
history and heritage |
news report 
Monday November 16, 2009 13:50
by DCTV
The story of drugs in the Inner City in the 1980s
In the late 1970s and early 80s Dublin was a city spinning out of control due to the first devastating epidemic of heroin addiction. Inner city communities were under siege as drug users converged from all over to buy drugs in their flat complexes. By early 1983 hundreds had died as a result of drug related problems. Ordinary citizens mobilised and took to the streets in an attempt to stop the sale and distribution of drugs which were killing their families, friends and neighbours.
They burst onto the scene attracting enormous attention as a result of directly confronting pushers and dealers, policing and barricading whole areas of Dublin in a community fight for survival. Thus began what has been described as the most significant social movement to emerge from Dublin’s working class community since the 1913 Lockout and the rise and fall of CPAD is told in new two part documentary series ‘Pushers Out’.
Pushers Out can be seen on DCTV on Saturday November 21st and Sunday 22nd at 8.30pm.
BROADCASTING AS PART OF OUR SEASON ON DRUGS.
http://www.dctv.ie/main/?p=1222
Comments (2 of 2)
Jump To Comment: 1 2Im involved in making this program and its mistaken to say that hundreds had died by 1983. Its true that hundreds died but many of this generation of addicts died years later and continued to die throughout the 90s. By 1983 perhaps dozens had died by overdose.
I grew up in heroin-plagued Ballymun in the eighties and nineties, and this was not the most significant mass working class movement since the lock-out, FFS. It was the working class turning against itself rather than facing up the real enemies in government and business whose policies and priorities had driven young people into the drug trade, as both dealers and victims. It was one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the Irish working class.
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