On Tuesday, Dispatch published an investigation into Britain's hidden opioid crisis, with a focus on how nitazenes — which are more potent than fentanyl — are ravaging communities across the UK.
Today, Natasha Carthew reports from one of those forgotten communities in her home county of Cornwall.
Sitting on the rocks of my childhood beach in Cornwall, I close my eyes to remember how things were back then, and perhaps more importantly, how different things could have been. I could have taken the path of so many friends — the path that looked like an easy escape, but was strewn with sorrow and suffering.
When I think about the villagers I grew up with, I think about driftwood bonfires and every adventure that started with climbing down from the coastal path and ended with pretending to swim with basking sharks. Those endless summers when someone’s mum would make us fish paste sandwiches and flasks of milky tea, and we’d head out towards the horizon. The sun would slowly rise and we kids, growing too fast into our older siblings’ jeans, would dream of a future where money, or the fact that we lived in the middle of nowhere, would not be an object when we grew into adulthood.
But those summers are over. How innocent and mistaken we were to dare to dream big while the smallness of reality crept ever closer. The childish games might not have changed, but the drugs have.
Above the sound of waves, I hear the screech of seagulls as they come in on a keen sou’westerly and swoop down towards what they think is a packet of discarded chips. When they discover it’s just a hunk of Styrofoam coming in on the recent tide, they move off.
The gulls, and their fight for food, remind me of the harshness of living in this place. The darkening sky couldn’t be further from the picture-postcard ideal of a West Country Summer. This is Cornwall in the winter months, where holiday homes are boarded up to leave villages looking more like ghost towns, and seasonal work is exchanged for the dole, again. It’s where locals sit around waiting for their lives to start, opportunities to open up, and that one bus to arrive to take them somewhere other than around and around in never-ending circles of not much.
No opportunities. No jobs. No transport. No prospects. No cash. No way out.
Is there any wonder why so many people living in Cornwall stumble toward the quick-fix hits of drugs — opioids, to be precise — to take them fully away, transported to another time and place? I know this well from growing up in Downderry in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, the drugs we took were a little more low-key and natural in origin, like hash and magic-mushrooms. But the opioid crisis that has recently hit both our “idyllic” shores and forgotten rough-as-fuck towns, coupled with unprecedented levels of deprivation, has caused this perfect storm. “There has never been a more dangerous time to take drugs,” says the National Crime Agency. A seamless, stark and starless storm indeed.
I am sure that this hidden crisis won’t stay unseen for long, when the summer of 2025 arrives and towns like Newquay and St Ives treble in size, when locals are kicked out of rental accommodation in order to sate the greedy thirst for Airbnbs — when they take to sleeping in shop doorways and on the beach instead. This is when the statistics will rise, when there will be more drug-related admissions to Treliske Hospital, and the body bags will start to stack up. Meanwhile, the middle-class summer tourists, the ones who use Cornwall as their personal playground, will wash in and out of their second homes with bags of premium cocaine — and then bugger off again. Those left behind are not so lucky.
The truth is, in Cornwall, like pretty much every county around the UK, we have a housing crisis. But unlike many areas, the lack of affordable homes is just half the problem, because we also have a shortage of jobs and stubborn low wages (read: seasonal only). Coupled with infrastructure difficulties and funding, Cornwall’s tempest rarely subsides.
The despair I felt as a young person growing up on the coast was insurmountable — the frustration that I couldn’t partake in afterschool activities because I lived ten miles away (we didn’t have a car), or that we local teens didn’t have a place to meet except in a shelter in the village memorial gardens. Was it any wonder that I left school at 15 with barely any qualifications and a drink problem?
Just as with drink, the pain that drug abusers seek to numb is multifaceted. But I know first-hand that it is very much connected to loneliness. The solitude I experienced growing up, and the isolation people mention now, is akin to despair. Despair because no matter how hard you try to make a difference in your life, there are a million factors that tell you that you don’t have a bloody chance.
How can you apply for a job in the nearest town when you can’t rely on public transport and you don’t have a car to get there? How can you afford a car when you don’t have a job? How can you afford to put down a deposit on a flat when the rent quadruples in summer? How do you learn social skills when there’s no community centre or youth club in your village, no third space where you might learn something more than how to do hot-knives?
How did I feel, and how do the locals I talked to in Newquay, St Ives, Looe and St Austell feel? They feel lost, worthless, forgotten. While they know substance abuse is dangerous, to them it is something. It doesn’t just numb their pain — it blunts the edges of their existence so that they don’t have to think or wonder further than the perimeter of nothing.
This sense of hopelessness is heartbreaking. Heartbreaking because it exists, and heartbreaking because nobody expects a remedy. Rural poverty is something very real but never really talked about in the press and on the news. That’s why this week’s Dispatch investigation is so important: because I fear the uptake of traditional opioids in my home county of Cornwall, coupled with the rise of nitazenes, is a catastrophe waiting to happen, one which our overstretched medics and single hospital will be hopeless to tackle.
When I wrote Undercurrent, a memoir of my Cornish childhood, in the summer of 2022, I never could have imagined that the despair in this region would soon get worse. Spring may have arrived, but the skies over Cornwall are starting to darken.