Terror is no answer to drugs issues

Jack Houlahan, a former leading worker with the Northlands Centre dealing with substance misuse and addiction in the North West, gives his personal view on the drugs issue, and warns that that violent vigilantism by groups such as RAAD is a hindrance not a solution.

I came to Derry to work as and alcohol and drugs counsellor in 1980. In those days there were no policies or strategies for tackling substance misuse; there were only people who wanted to respond to the problems they saw around them and who learned from those who had already got some programmes going (in America at that time). Among the would-be helpers were some, like me, who had experienced problems and wanted to prevent other people falling into the same trap.

However, the sincerity of our efforts didn’t prevent us making major mistakes, nor did it protect us from hypocrisy and bias in our attitudes. For myself, I might have been liberated from a damaging relationship with alcohol but I continued to smoke heavily up to the point where I had a heart attack in 1987. The other night when I drove past the pubs on the corner of Strand Road the most worrying sight I saw was the number of very young people who were smoking, the easiest and quickest habit to form and one of the hardest, perhaps the hardest, of all to break.

TRIAL AND ERROR

The biggest bias is always to the idea that the answer that worked for you will work for everyone else. ‘Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path’ is a mantra of the 12-Step movement. Another bias is the idea that there is really only one problem when instead there are as many variations on the theme of substance misuse as there are people who use alcohol, prescription drugs, tobacco, cannabis in its many varieties, cocaine and the many forms of speed or sedation. When I first worked in treatment in Derry the drug problems I encountered were cannabis, heroin and LSD; in the eighties Ecstasy emerged as a dance drug, at first as an alternative to alcohol but increasingly in combination with it; in the 90s heroin and cocaine became significant while today there is a bewildering range of synthetic drugs flowing from makeshift laboratories using chemical formulas shared across the internet; today, the dominant pattern here in the Northwest (as it is across the whole of Europe) is ‘polydrug use’, a jargon word to capture a reality we might summarise as ‘alcohol with everything’. It remains true however, that most of the drugs doing the rounds of our cities are derived from plants that have been in use by human beings from before recorded history – the grape and cereals for alcohol; opium for morphine and heroin and codeine and all the synthetic opiates; the coca leaf for cocaine; the tea-leaf and the coffee-bean for caffeine; the khat plant for mephedrone; the tobacco plant for nicotine.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK

What that should teach those who tried in the past and still try in the present to prevent dangerous use by eradicating all use is simply this: it can’t be done. The most terrifying anti-alcohol laws in the world don’t prevent alcohol use in Saudi-Arabia or the Muslim areas of Pakistan. The presence on the front pages of our local newspapers of black boiler-suited men with only their eyes showing through slits in their balaclavas will not prevent substance misuse here either. Human beings don’t undiscover things; each generation discovers them all over again for itself. The most incontrovertible evidence for this is the fact that 30% of Irish young people still take up smoking every year and the first question the community should be putting to RAAD or PAD is, why are you not as exercised about alcohol and smoking as you are about the much smaller percentage who get mixed up with street drugs?

Since 1980 the world of prevention and treatment has also changed. There is a Europe-wide policy and there are national policies with budgets attached to tackle the most problems that attract the most political attention. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Abuse (EMCDDA) ‘The European model can be characterised as pragmatically balancing drug supply reduction and demand reduction objectives, as well as acknowledging the importance of both human rights and community safety.’ There are education programmes for schools; there are education programmes to help parents; there are non-residential and community-based services promoting healthy living, moderate drinking. There are residential and non-residential treatment services. There have been youth clubs for generations now; there have been pubs with no beer and youth cafes and there have been all kinds of community outreach and community development programmes aimed at reducing the family and community damage done by substance misuse.

But we are still burying 21-years old who have died of alcohol-related liver failure or from the combined effects of alcohol and tranquillisers; we are still burying parents and grandparents who didn’t make into their fifties because of the scale of their dependence on alcohol or tobacco or both (or on alcohol or drugs or both). We are still taking children into care from mothers and fathers whose drinking or drug-taking has left them unable to look after their children and our treatment services are still responding, sometimes successfully sometimes not, to parents trying to get back children who have lost their way.

Every decade or so a new service comes into being claiming that existing services are not working – and of course they aren’t working because no existing service works for everybody.

THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM

The scale of the problem is this: Out of every group who develop a serious relationship with alcohol or tobacco or a psychoactive drug roughly one third will make it out the other end into freedom and recovery; roughly one third will continue to struggle on again off again or end up on the street from their substance misuse; roughly one third will die a premature death. So the policy makers and the counsellors and the services have no room for complacency.

There is simply no reason to believe that the problem can be solved by simply by closing off supply. In an interview given to the Derry Journal in 2009 RAAD said ‘the only way to alleviate this problem is to remove the dealers, those who peddle death within the community.’ This view appeals to many people in the community who simply don’t understand why there is no simple solution to the problem, a view I found in this quote on the Slugger O’Toole website: ‘What people should realise is that the PSNI aren’t doing anything to deal with drug dealers nor anti-social scumbags. SF are doing nothing to pressurise the PSNI into doing anything. Therefore people who are being terrorised by these lowlifes have no option but to turn to the vigilantes’. I can understand the fear underlying public attitudes to ‘drugs’ but there is enough accurate information around to help our communities realise that human societies have always managed to tackle their problems without having to ride roughshod over human rights or resort to terror. The best way to reduce exaggerated fears is to give people accurate information about the problem , not to reinforce their fear by terrifying violence. I can also see how different forms of community policing could be helpful but ‘vigilanteism’ only makes the likelihood of proper community policing recede into the future.

CONCENTRATED ATTENTION

Psychoactive substance use and misuse cannot be eliminated in this way. You may reduce supply a little by policing but you won’t reduce demand unless you create better, more satisfying alternatives. This is why in relation to alcohol and under-age drinking the enforcement of the laws and bye-laws only shifts the problem from place to place. In the past well- meaning projects like pubs with no beer and Derry’s Nucleus attempted to create those alternatives (I used to think the youth clubs provided alternatives until I discovered how understaffed they are and how quickly older teenagers leave them behind); they failed because these kinds of projects are unsustainable through public funding alone. Part of any regeneration plan should be the development of young entrepreneurs who will rise to the challenge of making the same profit form moderation and sobriety as others have made from physical fitness.)

The media have a responsibility to contribute to the community debate by making better use of the information they have easily to hand. The aforementioned European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Abuse has an excellent website and produces annual reports on the current state of drug use from every country in Europe, as well as the latest studies and trends on particular drugs as they come and go. Ireland has its own National Advisory Committee on Drugs and produces reports on every aspect of the problem in Ireland. The Department of Health in Northern Ireland also produces statistics on alcohol and drug use and treatment with each health trust area which are updated every year. We shouldn’t only be talking about these reports on the day of they are published but reflecting on the and debating them thoroughly in order to make some real difference.

The problem of substance misuse and other addictive behaviours (are we preparing ourselves for the huge gambling problem coming at us with the unprecedented access too betting and the aggressiveness of its advertising?) requires patience and concentrated attention. There should be an open door to anybody with ideas on how to improve effectiveness in every area of the work from treatment to prevention or community work and policing. Consultation not coercion will keep us on the right track. If we could turn that one third into a half or even two-thirds who make it back to freedom that would be really something.