By David (Claude) Raynes.
We are enslaving heroin addicts in a state-run chemical gulag
Barely 3% of those on methadone programmes leave treatment drug-free, says
David Raynes
There is an im****tant battle of ideas going on around Britain's extensive
use of methadone in the treatment of heroin addicts. Your interview with
Paul Hayes, head of the National Treatment Agency, re****ts that he was
recently "forced to defend his record against criticism that the current
strategy of treatment management" - using, for example, methadone for
heroin addicts rather than "curing" their addiction - "was failing and
wrong-headed" (Keep taking the medicine, June 18). We are told that Hayes
apparently dismisses his critics as "a few academics, politicians and
'ideologues' stoked up by the media". He says: "Any notion that investment
in treatment programmes has been a failure is wrong."
Britain has pumped huge funding into Hayes' methadone maintenance
programme, driven apparently more by the desire to reduce crime figures
than meeting addicts' real needs. Barely 3% of addicts leave treatment
drug-free. That is a miserable success rate in anybody's book, and if
Hayes thinks that this is indicative of an effective drug treatment
industry, he needs to tell us how he would define failure.
Does Hayes want increasing open-ended opiate maintenance at public
expense? We are told, and Hayes claims it a success, that users in contact
with treatment services have more than doubled in the last 10 years, from
85,000 to 195,000. "There are 130% more people in treatment than when we
started [in 2001], rather than half the people dropping out because
treatment isn't of good quality," Hayes says. But is the system really
working if so few become free of addiction? How many will be addicted to
methadone, at this rate of success, in another 10 or 20 years?
Genuine harm reduction is not objected to by anyone. But Hayes is in
denial if he does not recognise that most addicts want freedom from
addiction, that they want hope and help. Drug addiction, to legal or
illegal drugs, affects not only the user. It affects the unborn, families
and society. With galloping costs for drugs maintenance at public expense
we are entitled to ask if there could not be better outcomes for the
addict and for society.
Hayes suggests that the opposition he detects to his policy is because of
"an element of electioneering and political expediency", and he claims
that "there was a political consensus for some time that drug treatment
was a good thing and that therefore the more we had of it the better".
This is untrue; there has been widespread concern for years about the
rising numbers enslaved by the state in the chemical gulag his treatment
represents. The opposition is not primarily politically based. I suggest
Hayes needs to listen to his customers: most addicts want to be drug free,
and when they complain that they find it hard to get their allowance of
methadone gradually cut down (and they do), there is something seriously
wrong. Reducing addiction is the best route to reducing the total harm
from drug use.
ยท David Raynes is a former HM Customs investigation officer, and a member
of the International Task Force on Strategic Drug Policy
itfsdp@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dr John Watson
Baker Street
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