WE NOW KNOW THAT METHADONE HAS FAILED TO SOLVE

BRITAIN’S DRUG AND RELATED CRIME PROBLEMS.

SO WHY IS THIS TOXIC DRUG BEING ALLOWED TO

CONTINUE MAKING THOSE PROBLEMS WORSE ?

by Kenneth Eckersley

During over 30 years of methadone prescribing (for the much vaunted purpose of reducing drug related crime and drug addiction) the quantities of drugs being consumed, the number of drug users and the incidence of crime have all very seriously escalated year upon year.

In any other situation, such disastrous statistics would over-whelmingly expose and condemn such ‘treatment’ as an abject failure - but this has not happened.

As a result, an unbiased non-medical inspection of why methadone continues to be foisted on our politicians by the psycho-pharmacological lobby is now a priority, if internationally proven and truly effective abstinence goal treatments are ever to be allowed to become widely available in this country.

Methadone is a dangerous and addictive Class ‘A’ drug which is being prescribed to hundreds of thousands of drug users as a substitute for heroin and which is then dispensed to those users at taxpayer expense on a daily basis - usually for life – likely a life shortened by the methadone.

It is more addictive and longer acting than heroin. It is also more difficult and punishing for the user to withdraw from, as a result of which the likelihood of a methadone prescription user ever abstaining from methadone use is negligible - the PR statements made about reduction prescribing being hugely exaggerated.

Like heroin users, the vast majority of methadone prescription recipients are unemployed. Therefore, (in addition to paying the psycho-pharmacological practitioners for the methadone doses, the prescribing of them and their dispensing), the taxpayer must also pay to those methadone recipients Unemployment Benefit, Income Support and Housing Allowance, etc., as well as paying for the much greater amounts of medical attention the methadone user gets. Taxpayers also carry the burden of crime which some 50% of prescription methadone users commit to continue their parallel heroin usage.

On the other hand, instead of prescribing methadone, it is relatively easy to withdraw addicts from heroin and to then move them towards comfortable lifelong abstinence and a normal lifestyle benefiting not only the former user but also their family, their local community and the society as a whole.

So, why is the government continuing to pay for supplies of prescribed methadone for drug users, instead of using the vast sums involved to provide lifelong comfortable abstinence and a normal productive life of benefit to all?

The reason is – because powerful vested interests have worked hard and long to take over the drug ‘treatment’ field in order to create turnover and profit for their companies, and they are not going to let go of those millions and millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money if it can at all be avoided.

A labourer is worthy of his hire, and there is of course nothing wrong with paying for the provision of a solution to Britain’s drug problem.

BUT WE ARE NOT GETTING A SOLUTION !

Instead, we are getting professional lobbying, P.R. statements, commercial politics and industry cover-ups, plus increasing drugs use, more and more addicts, more and more taxpayer spending and more and more crime – all underlining a total and utter failure to reduce the size of our drug problem.

And the reason is not only because the psycho-pharmacological industry cannot cure drug addiction, but principally because they do not want to cure it. As was revealed in a recently circulated so-called ‘confidential’ whistle-blowing pharmaceutical industry memo - that industry views a drug addict as ‘a goose which lays golden eggs’, insofar as (by definition) an addict must have his daily fix and so can be made to rely totally on the psycho-pharmacological industry suppliers, who collect payment for their supplies - from the taxpayer.

But also totally clear is the fact that, because drugs addicts are usually penniless, IF THE TAXPAYERS WHERE NOT PAYING FOR THE METHADONE SUPPLIES, then the pharmaceutical industry would not bother to manufacture those supplies, and we wouldn’t have a permanent, costly and escalating U.K. drugs problem.

Of course the taxpayers would have to fund the curing of such addicts, instead of having the psycho-pharmaceutical fraternity going on ‘managing’ the continuing addiction of those addicts. But the beneficial differences in cost to the taxpayer and advantages to the society are staggering.

The sum spent by the taxpayer via the NHS just on providing the methadone doses to a user for only half of the rest of his life, would permit that same addict to achieve comfortable abstinence for his whole life.

But, by virtue of being unemployed and in receipt of so many benefits, a methadone prescription user costs the taxpayer much more than just the cost of the drug doses, and at the same time, because a majority of prescription methadone users continue to use other street drug, they continue to boost acquisitive crime statistics in their local community – again at taxpayer cost.

However, as is demonstrated in 39 countries, the cost to the taxpayer of curing a heroin addict is less than 20% of what it costs to condemn him or her to methadone maintenance prescriptions for life, and in 69 to 84% of cases, a positive result is achieved in a matter of weeks or a few months – not years.

Such effective abstinence achieving training also costs far less than supporting a prison inmate convicted of drug use and related criminal offences. And abstinence achieving rehabilitation is the only form of treatment which makes a full success of Drug Testing & Treatment Orders, CARAT and other Court Referral initiatives.

This is proved at over 150 public access centres, plus prison units, in 39 countries by a recovery programme developed 38 years ago in the Arizona State Prison System, and which helps 69+% of its ‘clients’ achieve for themselves comfortable abstinence for life. Of the 31% who do not make it on their first time through, about half return for a shorter second time and achieve the same relaxed lifetime abstinence result.

On the other hand, methadone prescriptions not only maintain and increase the numbers of persons on drugs, and the amounts they are using, they also totally fail to reduce the incidence of drug related crime.

At the same time, because clever and subtle psycho-pharmaceutical lobbyists have conned successive governments into wrongly believing that drug addiction is incurable, so-called ‘management of addiction by methadone’ is being permitted to side-line and undermine acceptance of hugely effective abstinence achieving rehabilitation programmes. Basically charitable volunteer programmes (which provide no profit for drug manufacturers or their psychiatric marketing colleagues) and which in fact ‘kill’ the demand from opiate addicted methadone clients simply by curing their addiction !

But don’t make the mistake of asking the opinion of members of the vested interest psycho-pharmacological industry. These are the self-proclaimed drugs ‘experts’ who are responsible for our present disastrous drug problem and whose main expertise is in profit before people.

To discover the truth, the Home Office must make its own independent non-medical study.

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