Poverty makes region the drug death capital

DEPRIVATION LINKED TO INCREASED DRUGS MISUSE

DRUGS workers say low incomes and unemployment help explain why the North East has the highest rate of deaths from drug use in the country. More people are dying in the region than anywhere else, as a proportion of the total population.

Official government statistics showed there were 532 deaths from drug use in the region from 2014 to 2016. This is up from 283 deaths from 2004 to 2006, 10 years previously.

The Office for National Statistics said: “The highest mortality rate from drug misuse was in the North East with 77.4 deaths per 1 million population, a 13% increase from 2015.”

But why is the problem worse in our region than elsewhere?

There’s no one reason why people become drug addicts, according to Zoe Davis, a Service Manager at Addaction, but there’s a link between drug use and poverty.

Addaction is a leading UK drug, alcohol and mental health charity which helps addicts quit drugs and change their lives and Ms Davis works with drug users, particularly heroin addicts, in Teesside.

There’s no one reason why people become addicted to drugs, according to Ms Davis.

She said: “There is definitely a correlation between illicit drug use and areas of deprivation and areas of poverty. The vast majority of the people we deal with are unemployed. The North East has a large unemployed population.

“There’s a lot of homelessness in the North East, which is massively under-represented in the statistics.

“A majority of our clients are within the benefits system, living in poor housing and not looking after themselves well.”

She said the drugs used in the poorer, more deprived areas tended to include heroin and alcohol, which “tend to take the edge off the world.”

“While they are using them, they don’t care about all those other stresses.”

Dealers targeted low income areas because they knew there would be a market for them, she said.

“You find that where there are particular streets or wards in an area that are deprived or low income, they are targeted by drug dealers because it is easy money. Once people are pulled in then it is very difficult to get out of.”

People in other circumstances might be attracted to different drugs, she said.

“Your occasional cocaine user may be a blue-collar employed person who is using it at the weekends. Cocaine gives a very different effect.”

Addaction is now dealing with middle-aged heroin users who were hooked in the 1980s, Ms Davis said.

“If you go back and look at drugs trends across the decades, they tend to go in cycles. The next generation rarely wants to do what the previous generation did.”

Drugs like LSD were popular in the late 60s and 1970s, heroin in the 1980s, Ecstasy and similar drugs in the 1990s, cocaine in the 2000s and now younger people are using “novel psychoactive substances” such as Spice, the drugs once known as legal highs before they were banned.

“Heroin has never gone away. But what you see in the younger generations is what they are picking up and using does tend to change.”

Durham Police and Crime Commissioner Ron Hogg has called for a new approach to fighting drugs, with a focus on getting users into treatment rather than treating them as criminals.