‘We’re seeing firearms, arson, attacks on homes’: the

With use in the country soaring among both young and older people, it’s not just the drug that is devastating lives but the violence and abuse that surround it

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Patrick Murphy remembers very clearly the first time he took cocaine. “I was 19, and that first line, I just fell in love with it,” he says. “The confidence it gave me, it was like nothing else. It was just so easy to keep taking it because it was everywhere. Even now, sitting here, I could get a bag in my hand in 10 minutes, faster than ordering a taxi.”

It took seven years for addiction to destroy Murphy’s life.