"Informed" decision making....

In the 1980s prior to the advent of Aids as a phenomenon, drugs became the moral panic of the decade, and, prior to the advent of the child molester, the drug dealer was the number one figure of fear and revulsion for polite society. Soap operas, documentaries and even Grange Hill featured this nihilistic pied piper, luring children and teenagers away to a life on the streets, enslaved to heroin forever. As with all moral panics, the fear over drugs was fuelled by the newspapers that searched for ever more lurid accounts of miss-spent youth, and as with all moral panics, it backfired spectacularly. Drug use continued to increase throughout the 80's, 90's and 2000's until we reached the addiction crisis we are familiar with now, but what is less well known was the progressive nationalisation of drug dealing that has occurred over that period. The biggest dispenser of opiates in the country, our very own bureaucratic Pablo Escobar, is, of course, the government, who this week ring fenced the funding for methadone, ensuring that the cycle of addiction will continue unbroken. It is an individual and social disaster, born of a toxic mix of political hubris and the imposition of medical doctrine on what is a spiritual and existential crisis. When Russell Brand, an advocate for abstinence based recovery, in his recent excellent documentary on addiction challenged a senior NHS official over the prescription of methadone, the response was revealing. The clinician told Brand that it was often better to keep an individual medicated with the watered down heroin substitute for long periods of time whilst their emotional pain was addressed, rather than risk them....here the argument dried up? What is it the NHS is so afraid of? What might a drug addict, deprived of methadone, a drug, actually do? At the Living Room Cardiff we see former heroin addicts consistently battle to get away from methadone so they can be free of drugs and finally engage with and resolve their pain, free from the fog of addiction at last. Nothing can be achieved by keeping addicts addicted, there is no doubt that the intentions of doctors and specialists are benign and well intentioned, but they are based in an ignorance that is integral to the medical model of recovery. In any normal medical situation, diabetes or a broken wrist, a specialist with expert knowledge steps in and marginalises the patient’s involvement, carrying out the necessary procedure in as short a time as possible. When it comes to addiction, the 'patient' is the expert, an alcoholic or heroin addict knows more about addiction than a doctor (if he isn't an addict himself) ever will, so the entire process of prescribing a substance like methadone which will supposedly 'help' an addict becomes farcical. All it will do is lock the addict in the cycle of addiction permanently, and most heroin addicts supplement their methadone prescription with, yes, you guessed it, heroin. This means that the government's ill-informed and misguided approach to drugs actually helps fuel the black market in heroin by keeping it stocked with customers. By failing to listen to the real experts, dismissing them with a high handed elitism, the problem continues to grow and lives continue to be sacrificed. We spend nearly half a percent of our entire gross national product on drugs policy, the highest in Europe, with utterly dismal results, simply listening to addicts in recovery and understanding the truth about addiction would be a lot cheaper.