DRUG TREATMENT SERVICES say that cocaine use has risen in recent weeks due to a shortage of heroin, the Examiner reports.

Drug addiction agencies warn that heroin users are turning to cocaine, tranquillisers and anti-anxiety drugs and face higher risk of overdose when supplies do return, as their tolerance levels will have dropped.

The Guardian reported in late October that there was an increasing number of women illegally selling drugs in Dublin city to pay off their debts.

More sleeping tablets are being sold illegally in Dublin as heroin became harder to come by.

Drug experts said drug abuse and dependency was likely to spread as more people began selling and getting involved in the drug trade. Graham Ryall of the Rialto Community Drug Team in Dublin told the Examiner that the price of heroin has jumped from €20 a bag to €50 a bag.

Leading consultant in emergency medicine Dr Chris Luke told RTÉ that he expects 500 people to die from using cocaine over the next 10 years, and said Ireland is only a quarter of the way through its epidemic. Luke said that cocaine causes “electrical chaos” in the heart and “kills suddenly and unpredictably”.

He told the Sunday Business Post that there is no one lethal dose of cocaine, any amount is dangerous and is made even more so when consumed with alcohol.

The heroin shortage has been linked to a fungus which blighted this year’s poppy crop in Afghanistan, one of the world’s leading suppliers of heroin.