C.E.P.T.A.
The CAMPAIGN for EFFECTIVE PREVENTION and TREATMENT of ADDICTION.
4b WHAT DRUG USERS SEEK &
WHAT THEY ARE OFFERED
Which Would You
Prefer ?
COMFORTABLE LIFELONG ABSTINENCE STARTING IN THE NEXT 22 WEEKS,
HARM REDUCTION HABIT MANAGEMENT ‘THERAPY’ FOR LIFE ?
When ‘harm reduction’ was first
introduced to handle the financial and health problems of existing drug users
in an increasingly HIV / AIDS / hepatitis contaminated society, the concept
made some sense. Helping lower the risk
to committed addicts whilst seeking a viable cure and the resources to deliver
it seemed a sound approach medically, morally and politically, and at the same
time apparently offered a reduction in risk to the public as well as the
individual user.
This is still the case in respect of the
existing committed user, but the original concept of ‘harm reduction’
has been high-jacked by vested interests, stretched and pulled out of shape to produce a false
substitute ‘prevention model’ and developed as a means of providing lifelong
business for the psycho-pharmacological industry which today is so-called harm
reduction’s greatest promoter and supporter, via allied lobbying and front
organisations like the Methadone Alliance, DrugScope,
the National Treatment Agency, the National Addiction Centre, the UK Harm
Reduction Alliance, the Scottish Drugs Forum, the Federation of Drug &
Alcohol Professionals, NTORS, RELEASE, Kaleidoscope, Exchange Supplies and
others.
Why?
Simply because drug companies
cannot make a profit out of an abstinent former drug user, as a result of
which (contrary to massive proof) the psycho-pharmaceutical industry pretends
that drug addiction is not only an incurable condition but is also likely a
mental illness – again contrary to the truth.
The development of so-called ‘drugs
education’ (teaching ‘informed choice’ (of drugs), ‘responsible use’ (of drugs) and ‘safe use’ (of drugs) to non-users of 10 years and above) provably does
little to prevent future usage.
Most often ‘drugs education’
produces youngsters who quite easily and with great cool are able to say:
“don’t worry Mum, I know all about drugs”, and based on that dangerous
little knowledge start experimenting and using,
instead of
prevention trained children who with
dedicated and fully considered commitment say: “don’t worry Mum, I’ll never
use drugs” – and who mean it.
Such ‘harm reduction drugs education’ is based on the false
idea that every youngster will ‘inevitably use’ drugs at some point in their
life, but this is not borne out by UK or international statistics, and properly
installed and continued, prevention
training based on “Just say ‘NO’”, and / or “Say ‘NO’ to Drugs”, etc., has
unarguably proved instrumental in significantly reducing drug usage start
figures in numerous parts of the world.
(Detailed statistics available from the Director of the National Drug
Prevention Alliance. www.drugprevent.org.uk )
In the field of purported ‘treatment’ of addiction by drugs the major
example of so-called harm reduction is the prescribing of methadone to heroin
users.
Methadone is of course that highly
toxic and addictive chemical substance which is sold for profit by the
psycho-pharmaceutical industry to the British government for distribution by
the National Health Service to over 300,000 addicts per day - every day of the year - and which costs the
British taxpayer some £1,300,000 per day - nearly half a billion pounds a year,
and rising!
In the 19th century it
was of course the pharmaceutical industry which persuaded government to
introduce morphine as an answer to the then opium problem. Some years later came pharmaceutical
proposals for the introduction of heroin to handle the morphine problem, later
to be followed by methadone to handle the heroin problem which had been
created, and now the pharmas have introduced naltrexone to handle the current
methadone addiction problem they themselves have created.
Methadone was originally ‘sold’ to
worried politicians by the psycho-pharm industry as a means of reducing the
acquisitive crime daily carried out by heroin users. The psycho-pharms promoted the false idea
that by giving daily methadone doses
to heroin users at taxpayer expense, the 2 to 3 times a day heroin users (and
the community in which they lived) would be relieved of the burden of stealing
to find the cash to pay for the heroin supply.
i.e. essentially societal harm reduction.
Sounded great! But it didn’t work
for a wide variety of reasons.
Although abstention by dose decrease
was originally claimed as the goal of meth-adone prescription, in nearly 25
years of close contact with drug problems, drug users and ex-users, like many
of my colleagues, I have yet to meet an individual who has come off methadone
by any form of structured dose reduction.
In fact they most often campaign for bigger more frequent doses. (via: ‘The
Secondly, methadone is not as ‘good’
as heroin in terms of the ‘high’ it produces in the user. Even when taken with white wine, it is
claimed to be merely “alright”, but heroin is preferred, and continues as the
dream hit with most methadone users.
As a result, the August 1999 survey
by the BIG ISSUE in the North – “DRUGS at the Sharp End”, revealed that 80% of
prescription methadone users continue to use another drug (usually heroin) once
a week, and that a staggering 44% of prescription methadone users do so once a
day! In fact, the majority of such
methadone users merely regard methadone as the ‘free’ part of their opiate
supply, which helps ward of the cold turkey effects of coming down off their last
heroin dose, whilst they work towards getting their next bag of heroin.
Thirdly, having earlier learned as
heroin users that acquisitive crime is relatively easy in our open society, to
fund their continuing desire for heroin, prescription methadone users continue
to steal, rob, mug and break-in, so that their community continues to
suffer. In fact, police have said that,
because of their access to free methadone, small ‘gangs’ of methadone users now
have more time to plan better prepared and more sophisticated crimes with less
chance of their being caught.
Fourthly, methadone does absolutely nothing for the user in terms of his or
her health, employability, general well-being and quality of life. Methadone users are still hard core opiate
addicts and, because methadone is a stronger longer acting drug, they not only
live shorter lives but also suffer severe side-effect health problems making
them a burden on their families and the society in other ways.
The vast majority are on
Unemployment Benefit, with a lot also on Income Support, Housing Allowance and
Child Allowance, and most of them are receiving more health care attention than
non-methadone users from GPs, psychiatrists and the NHS in general, so that the
U.K’s status quo harm reduction ‘treatment’ is one of the most significant
burdens carried by our taxpayers.
This commentary arises in part out
of the questions raised by the research of Professor Neil McKeganey and his
team, ‘Abstinence or Harm Reduction?’,
and, notwithstanding the Scottish Drugs Forum’s press release on those
university findings, our enquiries and experience shows that some 70% of drug
users who have used for 3 or more years want nothing other than total relaxed
abstinence.
(The percentage is lower for
cannabis and higher for heroin, crack and other drugs.)
The reasons are many and
varied. Some 12 Steppers succeed, but do
not manage to continue their abstinence without help from AA or NA partners for
many years. Others, during their first
3 years of usage, have often tried to come off, either alone or by using
various clinics, rehabs, detoxes and ‘relief’ systems, etc., and unfortunately
again succumb – mainly because they were not really ‘cured’ in the first place.
Most of those of the above 70% who
have been referred to methadone prescription end up bitterly disappointed to
find that the promised abstinence by dose reduction is not really obtainable,
and in fact there is a general acceptance even amongst methadone advocates that
the only defensible goal which might in some measure be available to methadone
prescribers is so-called ‘habit management’.
However, because of methadone user’s continued use of other drugs, and
their continuing crime to support their purchase, ‘habit management’ is now presented
mainly in the guise of “harm reduction”, because the ‘management’ is so
blatantly erratic, half-done and in any other context would be regarded as
‘bad’ management.
The main description applied to all
this is “maintenance”. As
psycho-pharmaceutical texts and speakers reveal, maintaining the individual on
methadone is the first goal, whilst maintaining (or even increasing) the
dose is the current policy being sold to politicians. The reason is simple. Such actions ‘maintain’ the
psycho-pharmaceutical hold on this field and ‘maintain’ (or even increase)
turnover and profit.
The main barrier to effective policy
adoption is political conviction that the ethical
pharmaceutical drug companies are the ‘experts’ in the drug addiction treatment
field. But nothing could be further from
the truth. A managed addict is a goose
which lays golden eggs for the pharmaceutical industry – so why ‘cure’ him?
BECAUSE OF ITS VERY
NATURE, DRUG ADDICTION is not a condition capable of being treated or changed
by anyone other than the dependent individual.
The fundamental effect of drug use
is to take away self-determination – i.e. to take away the control of the
individual by his own decision and intention.
Because he “must-have” his addictive drug, his life becomes determined
by the wishes of others in his environment and he loses the power to choose his
own destiny, other people’s intentions becoming increasingly capable of being
imposed upon him by his overwhelming need for that drug or drugs.
The essence of a cure for drug
addiction is therefore not the doing of something to a
user, but is the restoration of an individual’s power of choice over
his own life, and so it follows that any system in which another person or
group seeks to administer treatment to an individual will normally fail to
cure. This is because the only sure route out of addiction is the
lessening and eventual eradication of control of the individual by a drug or by
other persons doing something to or for him.
Current psycho-pharmaceutical drug treatment seldom claims
to produce cures, clearly because that is hardly a worthwhile commercial goal,
and even non-profit orientated decent medical ‘interventions’ seldom succeed in
producing cures.
This is because interventions - by definition - are
themselves further attempts by others to by-pass the individual’s own personal
intentions, and his responsibility for - and control of – SELF, and so are
doomed because they intervene between the individual and the drug he is
determined to confront and wrest control from.
It follows that there is only one
person – and no one else - who can cure an individual from drug use. He himself is the only person capable of
withdrawing himself. This means that the
only really viable route is to train
that individual in a workable abstinence goal method which he may then - of his
own volition - apply to himself and his condition.
As a result, the way forward is: 1)
training users in how to comfortably with-draw themselves from drugs, 2)
educating them in those modes of rehabilitation and living necessary to aid
them in their abandonment of drug use, 3) showing them how they may recover
themselves from the residual effects on their lives and livelihood of their
earlier addiction, and, 4) training them in the avoidance and prevention of
future drug use by themselves and others, with the goal of becoming
contributing and productive members of society.
Such a system was developed in the
Arizona State Prison System in 1966 and, since then, has expanded into numerous
other prison systems and into some 150 public access centres in over 39
countries. This non-medical drug-free
training and educational programme
achieves a 69+% success rate first time through the course, with approximately
half of the remaining 31% coming back and succeeding on a second time through
the programme.
For “succeeding” read: achieving relaxed comfortable abstinence
for life.
So why is such a hugely successful
programme not the darling of every major government in the world? Why are harm reduction and
psycho-pharmaceutical ‘treatments’ - with their ever escalating drug usage
statistics – still being supported by politicians?
The reasons are plain. Many individuals,
organisations or groups of organisations are working to ensure that drugs will
be more and more available – often for their own personal reasons or use, but
mainly to make maximum income and / or profit with minimum risk. Unfortunately, more than a few officials
‘fighting’ the drug problem are aware that they would be out of work if the
problem went away!
The vested interests are said to be
the obvious producers, smugglers and pushers of illicit drugs of all types –
the suppliers
that customs officers and police have been attempting to halt with sustained
and expensive law enforcement activities for the last half century.
But these “drug barons” and their
‘mules’ are only part of the problem.
Illicit drugs are the smallest part of the
1) Elected
policy-makers, civil servants, medical and psychiatric advisors and other
government employees who are themselves users of addictive
substances; recent notable examples being the former Deputy Drugs Tsar
and his Minister in the Cabinet Office.
And there are many hundreds (likely thousands) of others whose attitudes
are dictated by their own use of drugs.
(See: the recent revelation on both German and UK TV that usage of
cocaine appears proven in the European Parliament.)
2) Policy-makers,
civil servants, medical and psychiatric advisors and other official employees whose
livelihoods or lifestyles depend on drug consumption.
3) Those
national and international business interests for whom legal drug production
and sale can (and already does) provide income and profitability of eventual
astonishing magnitude. This is mainly the ‘psycho-pharmacological
fraternity’, said by many observers to control the NHS which has been entrusted
by successive governments with solving our drugs problems, yet has more
drug-use problems than any other government public service department.
4) Those
disguised lobbying organisations and individuals working ‘under-cover’ for
wealthy vested interests dedicated to taking over and expanding world drug
supplies and profits by covertly seeking the legalisation of
currently illicit drugs. These
include Mike Trace (former Deputy UK Drugs Czar and former United Nations Drug
Control Programme Demand Reduction Chief) and are widely believed to have
earlier included Roger Howard (former Chief Executive of DrugScope and many of his colleagues and contacts) as well as
international financial manipulator George Soros.
Our present escalating drug use
situation exists, not because that is the natural order of things or because
mankind is inherently bad or stupid. It
exists because someone is deliberately
making the present situation expand and persist. Our politicians are not evil. They are overwhelmed by workload, and by the
impossibility of their knowing all that is necessary about all the subjects
they must handle. As a result, they
become an easy target for manipulation by powerful and well-heeled lobbyists,
resulting in today’s drugs fiasco.
Drugs and drink create violence and
crime, resulting in despair, depression and death. Inversely, prevention, along with the
delivery of comfortable lifelong abstinence and culture change, create hope,
happiness and survival.
The key to an effective and worthwhile drugs strategy is therefore to
implement the culture change which will clear out the 40 or more years of
failed and still failing psycho-pharma strategies and their so-called
treatments, whilst at the same time installing the sort of effective
rehabilitation through education and training which has proved so successful
for nearly four decades in so many other countries.
The costs 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 swallowed
up by both illicit and prescription drug users, plus, of course the tax money
which would NOT be going to doctors, high street chemists and into the pockets
of the psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies for methadone and other drug
supplies.
The exact figures are not known, but
it is totally certain that the unit of measurement is Billions of Pounds – paid out of our taxes, and so out of our
pockets!
If you would like to see truly
effective residential D.I.Y. non-medical ‘training based’ rehabilitation
working, and would like to talk directly to students who have achieved or are
moving towards comfortable lifelong abstinence, CEPTA can likely arrange for
you to carry out a personal inspection and survey.
For further
information and details, Phone or Fax: (+44) (0) (1342) 811099
© Copyright
C.E..P.T.A. and E. Kenneth Eckersley, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 &
2005. All World Rights Reserved
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