We must look at the complexities and causes of addiction

IN SCOTLAND, families are losing a loved one every seven hours due to drug deaths. If we lost a loved one every seven hours due to terrorism or Ebola, what would the Government response be like?

Let’s not avert our gaze from the gravity of this problem or bury our heads in the sand.

The facts and figures speak for themselves – Scotland has a public health disaster on its hands. It is hiding in plain sight.

On September 12, a group of unheard voices got to sit at the debating table in the Scottish Parliament. I watched in awe as a man with nearly two decades of recovery took his rightfully earned seat at the main speaker table.

He went on to speak with passion and power about his own recovery journey and his two decades’ experience of supporting people.

It was a symbolic moment in our journey as recovering people, as we have never been included in the conversation about what recovery is and what it takes as a community to support people seeking to re-create and redirect their lives.

There was more than 200 years of recovery experience at that table. For too long, that expertise and wisdom has been ignored, dismissed and excluded.

We only found ourselves at the table due to the resilience, perseverance and passionate voices of the recovery community.

Drug deaths are inevitable but they are also preventable. The research backs this truth.

It was because of this that we decided to mobilise and create gatherings to highlight the apathetic response from our Government and also to offer support and connection to the families of the people lost.

We wanted to send a clear message that they are no longer alone and that we, as a recovery community, are prepared to fight to prevent families and communities being devastated even further.

We are a large section of the recovery community, and the most successful in supporting people into sustainable and productive recovery.

Introspection and self-reflection is important in maintaining personal growth for individuals and organisations in every walk of life. This process allows us to examine what is causing failure in our personal lives, occupations and affairs. It allows us humility to seek reconciliation and make amends when we are wrong.

It is a process that demands rigorous honesty with self and others.

Rigorous honesty is a central tenet in having contented recovery. Our lives depend on living by that code of conduct. It is why you can rely absolutely on what people in our way of life say about themselves.

These individuals are predominantly found in 12-step fellowships, Alcoholics’ Anonymous, Narcotics’ Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous etc. To date, it is the most successful addiction recovery treatment process on the planet.

People in long-term recovery are used to having this fact-finding and fact-facing inventory of our own behaviour, and our mental and emotional processes.

Personal inventory is an essential part of staying well.

If we looked at the current treatment paradigm in Scotland, could we say it was operating with the same integrity, humility and compassion?

Addressing drug deaths means acknowledging the treating and prevention of the trauma that creates drug addicts in the first place. As the large-scale international epidemiological studies and countless trauma research studies have shown, childhood adversity is at the core of the emotional patterns and psychological dynamics that drive substance addiction.

As our Government, housing services, NHS, first responders, and addiction services struggle to cope with this shocking rise in overdose deaths, they do so in a culture devoid of a deep appreciation of the complexity of addiction and its causes.

If we really want to be progressive as a nation in addressing this complex problem, we need to have organisations and services that are a reflection of the people they are claiming to save.

ANNEMARIE WARD CEO OF FACES AND VOICES OF RECOVERY spoke at the Daily Record’s debate at Holyrood, which led to three more “lived experience” voices being included in the Scottish Drug Deaths Taskforce. Here, she argues that people with direct experience of drug addiction are key to any new approach