Know the score
This is how much methadone one addict took
Hamilton Accies are highlighting the harrowing story of a former professional football player’s fight to get off methadone.
The club’s community outreach team are working with children’s charity Blameless to tell the story of Colin Mcnair.
The former Motherwell, Falkirk and Dumbarton player was kept on the heroin substitute for 17 years.
He now works with Accies and boards have sprung up around Hamilton warning about the dangers of drugs.
The street signs tell how Mcnair consumed over 558 litres, or 123 gallons of methadone, during that period of his life.
Accies chief executive Colin Mcgowan, the driving force behind the move, told the Advertiser: “Our Know the Score advertising boards are there to highlight that whilst methadone has a place in assisting heroin addicts to break free from the cycle, we have heard of people being stuck in the grips of methadone addiction for years.
“Colin Mcnair, a former professional footballer with Motherwell FC who now works with Accies to deliver anti-drugs talks in the community, features heavily on this advertising campaign as he was, indeed, on a methadone program for 17 years – taking 123 gallons of methadone over 204 months.
“That is absolutely harrowing and unacceptable. Like so many thousands of others, Colin should have been on a 12-month program which was gradually reduced until he was drug-free.
“Instead, he consumed three barrel loads of the opiate prescribed by doctors as a substitute for heroin.
“We don’t claim to have the answers to the drug epidemic in Scotland, we simply feel that there is a public duty to try and highlight the issue within our local community and indeed direct people, whether they be users or friends and family caught up in drug addiction to our website www.getcleanandsober.com in a bid to help and set them on the long path of recovery.”
The first advertising board was unveiled at Douglas Park Lane last week and aims to stage public awareness of the “drug epidemic in Scotland”.
And the community outreach team believe this is another way, as well as delivering their hard-hitting talks to pupils in schools across Lanarkshire, to try and get through to the community about the harrowing statistics of drug and methadone misuse.
Their move has been backed by Central Scotland MSP Monica Lennon She said: “Hamilton Accies must be commended for the work they do with our local communities and in particular young people, to educate them about the risks associated with the misuse of alcohol