C.E.P.T.A.
The CAMPAIGN for EFFECTIVE PREVENTION and TREATMENT of ADDICTION.
4c THE LASTING ALTERNATIVE TO
PRISON
Effective Drug
Treatment - the Key to Successful Community Solutions
by Kenneth Eckersley
The best cure is prevention. However, as we already have a serious drug-dependency
problem, we also need viable treatment to help existing users. "Intervention" is the medical
catch-all term used to embrace every activity supposedly intended to provide
relief, cure, therapy, rehabilitation, detoxification or other treatment of an
individual's drug or alcohol problem to the benefit of the individual or the
community or - hopefully - to the benefit of both.
In fact experience shows that, if we
are to achieve real solutions for drug problems in any residential, social,
educational or workplace community, our success will depend on the ready
availability and provable quality & effectiveness of the treatment
utilised.
The Headmaster who discovers a nest
of drug-users in his fifth form is faced with either expelling them or with
sending them away for a pattern of treatment which will return
them in a none dependent condition whereby they may continue
their education in a proper manner and to a proper standard.
The Employer who develops and
implements a "Substance Misuse Policy"
in keeping with the advice of government and local police is undoubtedly going
to identify a goodly proportion of the regular drug-users on his payroll. Some, if not all of them, may be skilled
tradesmen in whom the employer (and the education system) have invested time,
money and effort in training and development.
So what should the employer do?
Toss them out onto the scrap-heap?
Waste all the investment of years by sacking them and thus increase the
burden on the society's overloaded resources?
Or - shouldn't the employer be able to
easily find some form of rehabilitative cure whereby he can see returning to
the desk, retail counter, board-room or workbench an employee who is happy to
be alive and very grateful to his boss?
Inside our Prisons, the only
worthwhile hope for the inmates' future - and ours - is for the authorities to
find a way of ensuring that they are released in a fully cured condition -
whereby they will remain abstinent for life. But how often is this the case?
Then there is the Magistrate or
Judge - and the police as well - who must day after day choose between i)
committing a drugs offender to prison, or ii) letting him go free on probation
or with a caution, or iii) seeing that he gets cured of his habit. In a region where an effective permanent cure
is available, choice number three will win every time to the great satisfaction
of all concerned. For the truth is that
"Drugs Courts", DT&TOs or any decision based on future prevention
cannot work without truly effective
cure-based treatment available.
Unfortunately, experience over the
years has shown that intervention is not uniformly effective and that by far
the vast majority of established treatment actions produce only a TEMPORARY or
PARTIAL form of relief, or even only a change in the form or nature of the
dependency.
In fact headmasters, youth leaders,
employers, military leaders, police and the judiciary, etc., are increasingly
being made to feel ineffective because they are finding that the interventionist
organisations on which they thought
they could depend are regularly proving incapable of delivering the results
they appear to promise.
No one throws good money after bad
for very long, community leaders lose their enthusiasm very quickly in face of
a lack of dependable results, and apathy soon becomes the norm.
WHICH IS,
OF COURSE, EXACTLY
WHERE WE ARE
TODAY!
The problem is not concerned with
whether or not there should be intervention.
It is concerned with the "effectiveness" or "quality"
of the intervention in terms of results. So
what do we mean - or more properly - what should we mean by
"effective"?
First, a majority of persons agree that the intervention must be
an activity which, for the individual and for the community, solves
the immediate problem. i.e. it
must take away the need, the craving, the dependency, the addiction -
call it what you will.
Second, common-sense dictates that any interventive action must
not create another dependency problem in the individual. i.e. cut out so-called substitution,
maintenance and habit management therapies.
Third, the sheer economics of the whole subject dictate that the
individual must be rehabilitated to a point where he is thereafter both willing
and able to take responsibility for his own life, his family and his
career, and, the cost of training the addict in that should be less costly than
current answers.
Fourth, the intervention should provide a lasting solution - i.e. abstinence
from then on - without need of further rehabilitative support.
But what happens when we cast our
minds back over any interventionist activities and results with which we may be
personally closely familiar. How many
cases of a lasting cure are we aware of?
On the contrary, how many instances are there of replacing one drug with
another in the name of therapy? What
percentage of former addicts do we know who are now taking responsibility for
their own lives or, conversely, how many come back time after time, are now in
prison or need continuing rehabilitative support?
Two years ago one highly
authoritative body stuck out its neck and - for very worthwhile and necessary
reasons - published a list of 79 statutory and voluntary organisations as "Sources of Help and Advice" for
employers wishing to find "treatment" for drug-using employees. Acting in good faith, but misled by current
psychiatrically based establishment practices, they came up with a whole armful
of maintenance, counselling and advice centres, but, on investigation only a
handful - six of them - actually offer any form of rehabilitation and / or
detoxification, and none of those are indicated as offering cures of any
description!
As a result, any employer determined
to contribute to a drugs solution by attempting to implement a full Substance Misuse Policy is very very
rapidly going to lose his earlier enthusiasm after trying and failing to find
an intervention agency which will undertake to get his drug dependent staff
members properly treated and terminatedly handled.
In fact, the main thrust of too many
of our present so-called "recognised" professional drug 'treatment' agencies is:
i) to
proffer "advice" or referral to another agency.
ii) to
provide needles to heroin users,
iii) to
organise group counselling - said to be basically a blind leading the
blind
activity,
iv) to
supply as "therapy" daily methadone doses or other prescription drugs
(in reality no more than alternative 'hard-core' addictions supplied at
taxpayers' cost), or,
v) to
offer some often nebulous form of "relief" rather than a defined or
specified cure.
With only a handful of notable
exceptions, it is in fact rather difficult to find many UK organisations which
will even define a "cure", and just as difficult to find any willing
to commit themselves even verbally to offering one. And even those prepared so to offer, prove
very reluctant to actually define what they mean by the word "cure".
Not surprising that we have a
British establishment where:
a) many
responsible decision-makers have been led to believe that drug addiction is
daily being cured in psychiatric clinics by the use of drugs, whilst, at the
same time,
b) other
policy-makers, including Ministers, have been told by psycho-pharmaceutical
sources that drug addiction cannot actually be cured!
Obviously both these contradictory viewpoints cannot be true, and in
fact - both are false.
Whilst it cannot be cured by
psycho-pharmacological drug based methods, drug addiction can be cured, and is
cured in 69+% of cases - by the addict himself - first time through an
international programme which trains him or her at 150 public centres (plus
prison units) in more than 40 countries around the world, and this has been
happening since 1966.
It takes time. Anything from
Their definition of effective treatment
is a "comfortable
abstinence for life".
i.e. a former addict or user who,
i) since
completing the treatment has not used his or her original addictive
substance(s) for a period significantly in excess of twelve months and who
is fully convinced that he or she will comfortably abstain for life,
ii) who
has not replaced such earlier usage with another addictive substance,
iii) who is now taking responsibility for his
or her own life,
vi) who
no longer needs further rehabilitative support, and,
v) who
is now contributing to his family and local community.
The foundation of a successful cure
is the clear recognition by everybody that an individual is responsible for his
own condition, and that he can himself improve that condition . . . . if he is given a workable way so to do.
This is not the normal
"revolving door" type of relief and relapse. It's a new life - for life !
Improving the quality of life for
the community by creating former addicts is a win for everybody
in our society. Except of course - for
those people who produce and distribute the drugs, and for those who deliver
their lifelong "therapy" at
Addicts are the most loyal customer
on earth, whether on illicit, licensed or prescription drugs! It is therefore very tempting to avoid losing
business by curing them, or even by admitting that someone else can train them
in how to cure themselves!
CURE OF ADDICTION KILLS THE VERY
PROFITABLE BUSINESS OF PRODUCING AND SELLING DRUGS.
And that is by far the major reason why we do not have effective
prevention and cure of addiction in operation throughout our society today.
For further information in
confidence: Phone: (01342) 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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