Dublin

Law Enforcement

One Garda might take you in, another might not. There was talk of new protections for Irish cannabis smokers, but without a particular law or date it was hard to know what people meant. See Marijuana Laws for the legal overview.

Where to Buy Marijuana

Marijuana was easy to get if you knew people in the loop. Street selling was “almost a dead art.”

If you stepped into Dublin knowing nobody, Temple Bar and Moore Street were the places people talked about. On a busy Friday or Saturday you might get offers outside the Temple Bar clubs. Moore Street had African shops and some street sales. “I’d say it’s virtually impossible to find proper bud on the street unless you’re really lucky.” Pub smoking areas were another way to meet people and maybe get invited to a party.

Marijuana Prices

Dublin prices at the time:

• Soap bar: €25 per quarter-ounce, €50 per half-ounce and €90 per ounce.
• Pollen: €50 per quarter-ounce and €180 per ounce.
• Grass: €50 for a bag described as roughly 5 grams.
• Weed / sinsemilla: €50 for 3.5 grams, €100 for 7 grams and €250–€350 for 28 grams.
• Hash oil: €40 per wrap; no weight was supplied.

Types of Marijuana

Soap bar was everywhere and was the easiest to come across. Pollen wasn’t rare, but you had to know the right people. Grass was more of a street thing and turned up when the bud ran out.

Weed had its good spells and could disappear quickly. Over the previous year it had been pretty consistent, just expensive. Hash oil was rare. I came across it maybe once a year.

Dublin figures from the period: 921 km², 1.12 million residents, Ireland, GMT/UTC+0, area code 01.

More Information

Dublin is the town that Guinness built. At St. James’s Gate, the brewery established in 1759 was once the largest in the world. Thousands came for a tour and a sample at the pub. An estimated 10 million glasses a day poured from taps in 150 countries: black stout, creamy tan head. Whiskey holds its own, too. Jameson was first distilled on Bow Street in 1780, and there’s Jameson, Bushmills and more in wood-paneled pubs and clubs blaring techno. In the Celtic Tiger years, the city drew young locals and visitors for the beer, spirits and late nights.

“During my time in Dublin, I found the Dubliners more interested in getting pissed [drunk] than getting high,” said Stuart Campbell, a Glaswegian who visited several times a year. There was still marijuana and hash around if you knew where to look. For club drugs like ecstasy, he pointed to Temple Bar.

Paul, a resident near Trinity College, described hash and other soft drugs as “freely available in Dublin, but you have to know whom to ask.” He added: “It's not a good idea just to ask random people in the street.” Campbell agreed, explaining that strangers might suspect someone was trying to implicate them with the police. He associated that suspicion particularly with areas affected by heroin use.

Jim Cusack, security correspondent for The Irish Times, said cannabis, ecstasy, amphetamines and increasingly cocaine were widely available in the Republic and Northern Ireland. He said the Gardaí and the then Royal Ulster Constabulary prosecuted possession, a different attitude from what visitors might expect in Holland.

In 1998, the Garda National Drugs Unit recorded seizures of 44,508 grams of marijuana, 690 cannabis plants, 798 LSD tabs, 604,827 doses of ecstasy, 4,419 ephedrine tabs and 333,167 grams of cocaine. Cusack said the crackdown targeted organized gangs that brought in cannabis, ecstasy, cocaine and heroin from the Netherlands, and mostly heroin and some cocaine from England. He connected that trade with the 1996 killing of journalist Veronica Guerin.

“We were at a nightclub, and a few different people came up to me and asked if I had any gear,” Campbell said. They meant ecstasy or speed. Every one of them was over from England on a weekend holiday.

“Maybe this means that tourists who were used to getting E in their clubs back home expected to get it in the same fashion in Dublin, and it wasn’t proving to be as easy.”