C.E.P.T.A.
The CAMPAIGN for EFFECTIVE PREVENTION and TREATMENT of ADDICTION.
2. OUR CURRENT
Why are they failing?
“Are they failing?”. The only way to properly answer that is to
first ask: “Exactly what is our country’s
present drugs strategy intended to achieve?” AND: “Who was it who actually formulated our current drugs
strategy?”. The voting public tends to
believe that its national Government, its politicians and their local
bureaucracy fully understand the drugs problem, that they know what they are
doing, and that they thought up the national drugs strategy themselves.
But this is just not true !
Democratic election regrettably
ensures that governments are amateurs in many fields, and successive governments
have been convinced by overwhelming professional lobbying that drugs are ‘a
very complicated matter’ which can only be handled by ‘experts’. As a result, governments have delegated all
responsibility to those self-styled experts, and so our drugs strategies have
been formulated, put in place and are actually run by none other than the
psycho-pharmaceutical industry.
So, the real question we have to ask
is: “What is it that the psycho-pharmaceutical industry wants to achieve from
our national drugs strategy? And a
little digging reveals their boardroom response as: ‘consolidation and expansion of turnover and profit’. Therefore, the psycho-pharmaceutical answer
to: “is our drugs strategy failing?” is clearly: “Well we hate to admit it but
we’re very happy with our expanding sales and profits, and we like having the
government as bulk buyers of our prescription drugs, because we know that the
addicts to whom the drugs are given couldn’t possibly themselves afford to pay
us for them”.
What a fantastic business! What a
wonderful formula for business success!
1) Drug
addicts are consumers who absolutely must
have such products.
2) Psycho-pharmaceutical
strategies ensure that the payments the manufacturers
demand are always paid by the government from taxpayer’s
funds.
3) In
the
National Health
Service pays a taxpayer funded incentive
commission to
doctors who prescribe
methadone, plus,
4) a dispensing fee to encourage high
street pharmacies to supply it to addicts,
5) and,
in the
promotion
(via organisations like The Methadone Alliance, DrugScope, the
National Treatment Agency, the
National Addiction Centre, the Advisory
Council for Misuse of
Drugs, the U.K. Harm Reduction Alliance and many
others), which all
help towards selling more and more ‘ethical’ pharmaceutical
drugs, paid for by taxpayers.
Look how so-called “Harm Reduction”
is being used to educate our youngsters into “informed choice” (of drugs), “safe use” (of drugs) and “responsible use” (of drugs)!
Look how booming internet sales are
deliberately by-passing parents, family doctors and prescription
safe-guards. Look how school
psychiatrists are daily prescribing more and more addictive drugs to increasing
numbers of school children – following
the same strategy of having our taxpayers pick up the bill.
And it doesn’t seem to matter to the psycho-pharmacological sale
strategists that,
once these drug prescribed youngsters leave school, they are several times more
likely to use illicit street drugs than other children – that is, if they do not continue on some other
taxpayer supported free prescription supply.
For example, after losing their
school distributed supplies of Ritalin etc., school-leavers who then become
illicit users of heroin, are brought back to pharmaceutical drugs by the
methadone prescription part of the psycho-pharmaceutical strategy.
Ladies & Gentlemen, our national drugs strategies ARE working, BUT
NOT FOR YOU and ME, and not for OUR FAMILIES or OUR COMMUNITIES.
INSTEAD, THEY WORK FOR THE BENEFIT
OF GLOBAL PSYCHO-PHARMACEUTICAL VESTED INTERESTS.
The real problem is, that it is NOT
the strategy our citizens need and
want. It is NOT intended to promote real prevention. It is NOT
intended to achieve comfortable lifelong abstinence.
Thirty-nine years experience in 40
countries demonstrates that such goals are totally available, but the only way
we are going to get them is by first throwing out the present strategy and its
profit orientated promoters, including the carefully planted ‘moles’ and covert psycho-pharmaceutical
supporters in our national bureaucracies, in our government offices and
departments and amongst the quietly and steadily lobbied and misled politicians
- mainly in government but also in some sections of the opposition.
Numerous psycho-pharmacologists –
and also some deluded members of all political parties - are saying that we
need more “resources” in the form of so-called treatment facilities as
well as more cash. But these are not the
real answers.
More of the current ‘treatment’ just
means more useless ‘habit management’ based on prescribing pharmaceutical drug
supplies, when it should mean:- more former
addicts trained to cure themselves and who thus enjoy comfortable lifelong
abstinence as valuable and contributing members of their communities.
Do you know that when drug smugglers
celebrate starting a new youngster onto heroin, this is also a cause for applause
by pharmaceutical producers of methadone?
This is because they know that, within about 4 years, that new illicit
heroin addict will be enrolled on a legal methadone programme – for life.
The key to an effective and worthwhile drugs strategy is to implement
the culture change which will clear out the half century or more of failed and
still failing psycho-pharmaceutical strategies and so-called treatments, whilst
at the same time installing the sort of cost effective ‘Do It Yourself’ rehabilitation
through education and training which has proved so successful for nearly four
decades in so many other countries.
The low cost of such rehabilitation
would be covered many times over by the savings in Unemployment Benefit,
Housing Support, Income Support and the excessive Medical Health Care required
and swallowed up by both illicit and
prescription drug users, plus, of course the tax money which would NOT be going
to doctors, high street pharmacies and into the pockets of the psychiatrists
and pharmaceutical companies to boost methadone, buprenorphine and other drug
prescribing.
The exact figures are not known, but
it is totally certain that the unit of measurement is Billions of Pounds &
Euros – paid out of our taxes, and so
out of our pockets!
If you want effective prevention and
cure, then we trust you will agree with CEPTA that it is time to get rid of
so-called “drugs education” and instead say ‘YES’ to Real Prevention Training,
that it is time to say ‘NO’ to the vested interests in control of psychiatric
and pharmaceutical treatment, and that it is also time to make sure beyond
doubt that pharmaceutical supplies of bulk chemicals can no longer become
raw materials for criminals manufacturing illegal street drugs.
© Copyright
C.E..P.T.A. and E. Kenneth Eckersley, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 &
2005. All World Rights Reserved