Cheap drugs
I read your report – ‘Shock at flood of cheap drugs – Social Media has made buying drugs easier’ – [2nd May 2019].
I am not entirely convinced that the price of drugs and alcohol, influences their misuse. Pure cocaine was once the prerogative of the upper classes –
because it was so expensive – so those of lesser means resorted to drowning their sorrows in cheap gin!
Elizabeth Burton-Phillips is correct in saying people ‘started using drugs and alcohol . . to self-medicate for a number of reasons. It could be loneliness, depression, or many other issues.’
Of the five, unnatural, deaths that have occurred in our ranks over the past five years, just one was suicide. All the others were caused by the abuse of drugs and alcohol – what could be described as ‘slow suicide’! But the most recent death – that of a man in his early thirties – who had used our services for many years – was not at all affected by the price of drugs.
On the occasions that he had no money for his latest fix of heroin, he would grind up prescription opiates, mix them with water, and then inject. I thought this practice to be very dangerous, but I did not criticise it. This man knew that I believe in legalisation, and in the prescription of heroin to addicts – which is why he was open about what he did. Had I been critical, he would have done it anyway, but not told me about it!
The same is true of alcoholics. I was reliably informed, by a patient who shared a room with him – at Prospect Park Mental Hospital – that one of our service-users, kept a regular supply of vodka, by his bed, in a Lucozade bottle!
Thus people always find a way of satisfying their addictions, and attempts by other people, to stop them, always fail. We have had a few, spectacular, success stories, when supporting people in coming off heroin, or alcohol, but only where these people had established successful lives, before becoming addicted, and wanted those successful lives, back.
This is why Elizabeth BurtonPhillips’s educational work with DrugFam is so important. If youngsters become addicted from an early age, as UKAT’s CEO, Eytan Alexander, says, ‘The drugs could impact their education, overall achievement in life, and expose them to a criminal environment at a young age.’
This is, indeed, our experience. We have never succeeded, in helping to cure, addicts who – due to such young addiction - have never achieved anything in life, and thus see no prospect of a better life awaiting them, if they cease to abuse drugs, or alcohol, so they stick with their addictioneuphoria! Education is also important so that people understand what they have to cope with.
A most dramatic drugs-incident once occurred at the crisis house – when a service-user staggered in – jerking in all directions, shouting, and asking us to close the curtains, because he was photo-phobic in sunlight. ‘I’ve just had a dose of ‘Billy’, he said.
‘What, in all the earth, is Billy?’ I enquired.
Other service-users enlightened me. ‘Billy Whiz’ is street slang for amphetamine! I thus believe the work in schools, and with parents, to be invaluable.
Pam Jenkinson – The Wokingham Crisis House