Recovery voices must be heard

"Drug users' voices must be heard in the battle against addiction," writes Mark Johnson in the Guardian newspaper today.

"I was humbled by the many people who contacted me about my last column, in which I labelled the way our government keeps drug-addicted people on controlled methadone prescriptions as a human rights abuse. As usual, however, the voices of the service users could barely be heard above the loud certainty of the service providers.

I believe everyone should be given the chance to recover from addiction, preferably through abstinence-based residential programmes, and there is no better opportunity to do this than in that huge residential institution where most addicts go sooner or later: jail.

But jails are bursting with legal and ­illegal drugs. The authorities are well aware of this, but it's easier to ignore the problem than deal with it. Drugs keep the wings quiet, after all. So the ­seriously addicted are supplied with methadone on prescription, the habits of others are uninterrupted, and a golden opportunity for abstinence-based residential treatment is lost.

On release, thousands leave as ­addicted, if not more so, as when they came in. And after passing one blunt, dirty needle around 30 men, some have picked up new diseases...

Most service providers know about addiction through education, not experience, and cleave to it in the face of conflicting views from those with experience. Methadone prescription is ­easily controlled, so it's easily evaluated and seems to tick boxes. Providers get job satisfaction because they feel successful; in some cases, salaries are tied to targets. But when "targets" are both defined and analysed by people whose income is tied to them, the big numbers mean nothing.

Here's a small number that should shame the government: in 2008, 20% of drug-related deaths involved methadone, but, to my knowledge, there have been no known deaths from opiate with­drawal. And here's another: just 2% of addicts receiving treatment are offered the opportunity of abstinence with the support they need – in a residential ­environment. That's about 4,000 of the 200,000 addicts in "treatment", but of the 140,000 people who passed through the prisons estate last year, 20,000 were given methadone prescriptions instead of the chance to give up drugs altogether.

Advocates claim that methadone ­addiction turns heroin addicts into ­ordered people, but maybe they should listen to the voices of those locked inside the methadone box. Then talk to the few who have managed to swap methadone "treatment" for abstinence, healthy living and the personal and emotional growth that goes with it. They look back on their methadone years as a shadow of real life. But that doesn't show up in any statistic."

Read the Guardian article here.

Mark Johnson, a rehabilitated offender and former drug user, is an author and founder of the charity Uservoice

Comments

[Frugal Dougal]

Ocasionally, methadone can play a valuable part in helping somebody maintain a structure in their life, IF that structure is already there before the prescription's signed; although you do see this, people ysing heroin who have jobs or run businesses, they're few and far between.

If methadone has a part to play it's predominantly as a short-term script to help people detoxify from opiate use, but if they're living in an area where drug use is rife, the chance is that somebody will end up using on top or just using after having diverted the methadone. As Mark Johnson says, getting somebody out of that situation and into a residential therapeutic setting is key. But the government doesn't seem to be able to see that the cost of rehab is balanced by the reduced costs to the police and judiciary of somebody being in such a setting; not to mention, as Mr Johnson indicates, the costs to our health system if people come out of prison with diseases caught from a shared needle.

Methadone isn't the villain of this piece; it's tying people's salaries to reaching a target of scripts dispensed. We need a pragmatic system which deals with each individual problem as it is, not as the latest missives from the DoH and NTA say it should be.

[phil bowman]

hello mark. I wrote to you from prison in 2009 as your book Wasted really inspired me, so much so I got myself into treatment in a rehab called the BAC and after 28 months clean time I am now a paid support worker for them.
I just want to say thank you for your words of encouragment and your endless passion for recovery.....abstinence IS the only way in my opinion and methadone is nothing more than a liquid spinach for the still suffering addict to motivate and maintain an already hectic lifestyle of crime and using. good luck for the future, mate, and keep up the good work. regards... phil.