1 Drug Problems

C.E.P.T.A.

The CAMPAIGN for EFFECTIVE PREVENTION and TREATMENT of ADDICTION.

1. THE U.K’S ESCALATING DRUG PROBLEMS:

To understand the true nature of our drug problems it is important to recognise that an addict doesn’t care whether his drug supply is legal or illegal, whether it is free, stolen or paid for, whether it is smuggled into the country by a drug baron or whether it is licensed or prescribed. He doesn’t care whether it is grown under sunlamps in someone’s attic, mixed up in some basement laboratory or carefully put together on some pharmaceutical factory production line.

He doesn’t really care if his supplier is a ‘mate’, a doctor, a street pusher, a pharmacist, a criminal or a psychiatrist. He really doesn’t care about the source of his supply. He cares only that he can get enough to see him through the day.

But, if he can’t for example get his usual illicit cannabis, he’ll comfort himself with licensed tobacco or alcohol or some easy to get prescription pill until he can again find his favourite weed. If he’s a drunk and can’t get legal alcohol, he’ll drink ‘meths’ or smoke legal tobacco or illicit cannabis. If he can’t get his usual illicit heroin, he’ll use prescription methadone – or vice versa, and if he can’t get enough prescription Subutex, he’ll again turn to illicit heroin or to illicit nederweed.

When an ADHD psychiatrically labelled student leaves senior school or college, and so can no longer get his daily prescription supplies of Ritalin or Prozac from his school psychiatrist, he will quickly seek to replace it with anything he can get – whether illicit, legal or another prescription drug.

Whether a given substance is “illicit”, “legal” or “prescribed” varies from country to country and from time to time within a country, depending on political opinion at any given time or place. But, irrespective of the political opinion of the day, irrespective of “illegality”, “licence” or “prescription”, the one factor which remains constant is the habit forming nature of the drug, i.e. its power to addict - and thus place control of the user’s life in the hands of his suppliers.

It is thus also important to recognise that usage of street drugs plus habit forming legal drugs and addictive prescription drugs are all INTER-DEPENDENT, and that if we are to succeed in handling Europe’s drug addiction problems, it is essential that we look at EVERY type of drug usage – all of which have been escalating for well over 50 years, to the detriment of our whole society.

Illicit heroin users are prescribed methadone and Subutex. Under-age youngsters illegally using legal alcohol and tobacco more often and more quickly take up illicit cannabis than those who don’t use them, and pupils psychiatrically prescribed legal Ritalin or Prozac more easily move to illicit street drugs even when still at school. ‘Illicit’, ‘legal’, ‘licensed’ and ‘prescribed’ are not separate problems – they are different facets of the same problem, and all must be tackled together.

Enforcement of drug laws (against drug smugglers, basement drug factories and attic and greenhouse cannabis growers) has consumed millions of police, customs and excise working hours as well as billions of Euros and / or Pounds - and is still not working to significantly reduce drug usage.

This is because law enforcement is restricted to tackling supplies of street drugs. But we also need a better way to handle supplies of legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol and most important of all - we need to tackle our biggest drug market – which depends on pharmaceutical suppliers for its existence.

Pharmaceutical drug production creates involuntary addiction of old ladies to pain killers and to tranquillisers like the benzos and Valium, it puts our schoolchildren onto Ritalin and Dexedrine, our teenagers and adults onto ecstasy, fluoxetine (Prozac), Seroxat & Lustral, and puts existing heroin addicts onto methadone and buprenorphine, etc. All dangerous addictive drugs paid for by all of us – the taxpayers.

However, during the last 50 years, in order to divert attention away from the truth, the failure to reduce drug usage has been unjustifiably blamed by self-protecting and influential vested interests on:

* insufficient enforcement of drug laws by police and customs,

(when the truth is that it is the laws which are faulty and the allocated

enforcement resources insufficient),

* on the pretended ‘lack’ of a workable system of Prevention, and on,

* the pretended ‘non-availability’ of a real lifelong Cure for addiction.

Research into finding workable Prevention and Cure systems is made to appear necessary. But is in fact NOT needed, because there already exist EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE drug Prevention and Cure programmes - available at least since 1966 - which are now delivered by a variety of organisations and by more than 150 public access centres, plus prison units, in 40 countries, and WHICH ARE ALL SUPPRESSED BY VESTED INTERESTS.

Consequently, the Campaign for the Effective Prevention and Treatment of Addiction exists for the purpose of contradicting and exposing vested interest P.R. campaigns, which side-line, marginalise, criticise, hide and even deny provenly effective results achieved by non-psycho-pharmaceutical addiction recovery programmes. Those same vested interests also deliberately hide the appalling failure to cure of current psycho-pharmaceutical “treatments”, and promote so-called ‘harm-reduction’ based “drugs education” instead of supporting real prevention training.

There’s nothing wrong with marketing and there’s nothing wrong with making a profit. Real entrepreneurs do it every day without hurting anyone. Honest businessmen do it by delivering what they promise – treatment which cures, rather than a substitute ‘habit management’ which is merely a marketing strategy designed to keep a patient in profitable therapy for life. And honest businessmen don’t say drug addiction is incurable when they know full well that organisations around the world are every day helping addicts to cure themselves.

Or is pharmacology not the precise science we are led to believe? Is the problem one of competency, as was suggested by a recent Commons Health Select Committee inquiring into the influence of the pharmaceutical industry? Or is the problem one of complacency, as the same Committee also suggested? In any event, history confirms that that industry pays scant regard to self-regulation and instead evinces an astonishing ‘couldn’t care less attitude’ of diplomatically dispensed arrogance.

The question is however – does democratic government, hamstrung by the ballot box, really have the courage to confront organisations whose campaign contributions, lobbying, and influence over local employment levels in most constituencies can be a deciding factor at the next election?

Many psycho-counsellors believe that most human beings are naturally accident prone, and that the drug problem gets worse because we are weak-minded or because we don’t care about our fellows, etc. But this is not true.

Social problems like increasing drug addiction get worse only because of lack of broad public understanding and lack of action to combat the problem, OR because of deliberate actions taken by a minority which result in a worsening of the problem.

By depriving the public (and their political representatives) of the true facts of the situation or by feeding them false reports and re-assuring platitudes, lying lobbyists and PR men can induce an apathetic ‘nothing can be done about it’ attitude which permits their vested interest employers to foist amazing so-called ‘solutions’ on to civil servants, government and public alike.

But the deep down truth is that for a problem like escalating drug addiction to continue in the face of public outcry and concern, there has to be a deliberate intention for it to continue amongst at least a minority of organisations capable of influencing the situation.

AND THIS IS THE NUB OF THE PROBLEM: For psycho-pharmaceutical production to be expanded, for sales to be improved and for profits to be raised year on year, it is essential that there be more and more youngsters directed towards drug usage and that existing penniless addicts continue to be supplied at taxpayer cost !

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