DRUG PROBLEMS AND DIVERTING ATTENTION FROM

THE NEEDED AND AVAILABLE REAL SOLUTION

by Kenneth Eckersley

During over a quarter century of methadone prescribing for the express purpose of reducing drug related crime, the number of drug addicts, the amounts of drugs being consumed and the incidence of crime have all seriously escalated year upon year. In any other context, such disastrous statistics would over-whelmingly condemn such ‘treatment’ as an abject failure. An unbiased non-medical inspection of truly effective treatment is therefore now a priority.

By its very nature, any addictive drug takes control of a user’s life. As a result, underlying all rehabilitative efforts, the essence of effective treatment lies in returning the control of his or her life to the individual.

It follows that treatment based on another addictive drug such as methadone, (or on hypnotism or evaluative and invalidative counselling) can never return the necessary control of his or her life to an individual, because such activities are themselves based on further control of that individual’s life by external factors, and thus can never be other than self-defeating.

To succeed, history shows that any effective programme of drug rehabilitation must first of all wrest direct control away from the drug, using a relatively comfortable short-term withdrawal system, followed by stabilisation of the individual in ‘the here and now’.

To avoid future toxic attacks, drug metabolites and other drug residues stored in the body as a result of earlier usage, must then be flushed out of the tissues by stimulating and reinforcing the body’s natural urge to rid itself of toxic materials via sweating, urination and defecation, etc.

Because such drug residues are temporarily released back into the blood-stream during the flushing out process, the stored drugs’ attempts to again take control of the body must be resisted by providing full and adequate nutrition and rest, as well as by giving assistance to the body’s internal communication systems and external sensory perceptions.

Throughout the above and continuously throughout any rehabilitative programme it is necessary to help increase the individual’s knowledge of his condition, his body, his mind and himself in order to raise his self-determinism, his self-esteem and his responsibility level, as it is only in this way that he can himself regain full and permanent control of his life.

Obviously this is a gradient procedure based on what he is doing for himself and for others. It is a very far cry from any situation where he has things done to him, because anything done to him is once again a situation where someone or something else is in control of his body, his thoughts and his life, so that he himself is then clearly not the one in control.

The foundation of a successful cure is the clear recognition that an individual is responsible for his own condition, and that he can himself improve that condition, if he is given a workable way to do so.

This recognition of responsibility is seldom apparent in an addict just starting the rehabilitation of relaxed abstinence, but it is there, it can be found and it can be gradiently nurtured until the individual knows it for himself, starts to again take responsibility and thus again fully takes control of himself and his life.

Knowledge, responsibility and control are thus a trinity essential to the restoration of an individual’s self-determinism and his or her re-assumption of a normal life, with a good job, a happy family and a welcoming community.

This is proved at 150 public access centres, plus prison units, in 40 countries by a rehabilitation programme developed 39 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 first time through, about half return for a shorter second time and achieve the same relaxed lifetime abstinence result.

But what is the usual future for a heroin addict put on methadone maintenance prescriptions? These are most often given for life at taxpayer’s expense and provide a desperately poor survival level. (See the Big Issue in the North Aug ‘99 survey)

The present official screening, assessment and referral system gives him little real knowledge of his condition or of abstinence goal alternatives. All responsibility is taken away from him by the application of ‘therapy’ to his body on a strict routine basis by others, and the powerful and addictive drug methadone which he daily receives takes over control of his life, replacing and reinforcing the control earlier exercised by his heroin addiction.

The above is how bad things would be IF a user strictly adhered at all times to his prescription programme.

But unfortunately it is well known that such adherence is seldom if ever the case, because authoritative studies show that 80% of those on methadone use another drug (usually heroin) at least once a week, and that over half of these use heroin on a daily basis. And to pay pushers for their heroin supply, these methadone prescription ‘patients’ continue the life of acquisitive crime they learned when on heroin alone.

In fact many police believe that their free daily methadone supply permits such users more time in which to plan more sophisticated crimes calculated to allow less chance of their being caught.

As a result, methadone not only fails to reduce the number of persons on drugs, it also totally fails to reduce the incidence of drug related crime.

Such ‘treatment’ also maintains a majority of those in receipt of prescription methadone on Unemployment Benefit, Housing Allowance, Income Support and on more intensive, more frequent and more costly NHS medical support than the average citizen. At taxpayer expense, the methadone prescription system also pays commissions to psychiatrists and other prescribing physicians, as well as paying dispensing fees to pharmacists and costs plus profit to the methadone producers.

Then there is the cost burden of the complicated and long-winded screening, referral and assessment system involving NHS, NTA and DAT personnel, which leads up to and follows up the actual prescribing and dispensing process.

A methadone user in receipt of prescriptions normally receives them daily and for life. Less than half the cost of that lifetime drug supply alone would pay the full costs of effective residential rehabilitation leading to the user’s attainment of comfortable abstinence for life – in just a very few months.

But if one also includes all the above related costs of maintaining a methadone user in the society at public expense, then effective rehabilitation leading to comfortable abstinence for life costs the public purse far less than 20% of what it costs to keep a methadone user on prescription for life. In addition, effective rehabilitation expands the country’s Gross National Product and so benefits the whole economy.

Such effective abstinence achieving treatment also costs much less than supporting a prison inmate convicted of drug use and associated criminal offences. In addition, abstinence achieving treatment is the only form of treatment which makes a full success of DTTOs, CARAT and other Court Referral initiatives.

Because methadone is itself a strongly addictive drug, it has never produced such results, it never can and never will. Proof of this is all around and is sufficiently clear for anyone willing to look and to recognise that methadone’s only real result is measured in vested interest profit terms – all at taxpayer expense and at the cost of government credibility.

But by far the wrong people to ask about this is psycho-pharmacological gurus, the self-proclaimed and falsely perceived drugs ‘experts’.

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

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