November 2015 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| 7
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drugs and found the prohibitionist rhetoric hard to reconcile with
their experience that in no way are drugs actually ‘controlled’ in the
UK; all the laws seem to do is make drug use more risky and create
vastly profitable, often violent, illegal marketplaces.
This, I would suggest, is the reality that most drug users, their
families, service user organisations, the police and treatment
providers see everyday – but the treatment providers aren’t talking
about this, with some honourable exceptions.
Does your organisation take a position on drug reform?
Take a look at the Count the Costs of the War on Drugs
campaign
), an in-depth and
fully referenced resource on the reform debate, and sign
up to examine the alternatives.
Ian Sherwood is a volunteer at Transform,
He worked
in drug treatment from the mid 1980s in voluntary and statutory
sectors, as a clinician, manager and commissioner, and served three
terms on the ACMD. He would love to hear from you at
.
‘It now appears that the
parameters of acceptable
debate have shifted to
“recovery” and little
else. Despite a major
upsurge in overdose
deaths, talk of “harm
reduction” is
increasingly taboo –
and completely absent
from government
communications.’
reintegration – where people may still drop out of treatment, but can
re-engage later without the threat of criminal sanctions.
Recent statistics on overdose in the UK are a depressing but
timely corrective to the complacency regarding the success of drug
treatment in the UK, and it seems very peculiar that no one is
arguing for anything other than naloxone and training. It appears
that an older cohort is dying, probably linked to the increased
availability of imported heroin.
There hasn’t been any mention of drug consumption rooms
(DCRs) – a widely researched, effective harm reduction intervention,
again commonplace in Europe (and also found in Switzerland,
Australia and Canada). Similarly, is anyone arguing for supervised
injectable heroin – a well-researched intervention that comes under
the heading of legal regulation? Surely if we are serious about
wanting to stop people using and dying from illegal heroin we would
look at quality evidence-based interventions for the hard to reach
and the even harder to keep in treatment.
Another voice in the debate belongs to those who have
been bereaved by drugs. The Families for Safer Drug
Control group (now under the banner of Anyone’s
Child,
), are simply
people who had lost a loved one to
