Mark Johnson is passionate about drug treatment in jails, but his opinions overlook the facts (Drug users must be heard in the battle against addiction, 20 January).And so Paul is determined to tell him what those facts really are...
Despite what he says, the voices of users are heard – a key driver for making methadone more widely available was the class action taken by almost 200 ex-prisoners a few years ago.Err, excuse me..?
Being taken to court and losing is 'hearing the voices of users', is it? Well, sure, but only in the same way that Harold Shipman suddenly realised that snuffing all those nuisance elderly patients was wrong once the police caught up with him...
I can see someone's trained Paul well in the art of bureacratic dissembling.
Johnson says "everyone should be given the chance to recover from addiction, preferably through abstinence-based residential programmes, and there is no better opportunity to do this than in that huge residential institution where most addicts go sooner or later: jail". Yet this already applies to those serving longer sentences. I agree that prisons provide a respite from the chaotic lifestyles experienced by drug misusers…Maybe I'm old fashioned, but those 'chaotic lifestyles' don't just spring into being on their own, do they? Don't drug addicts bear some responsibility for them?
However, over half the prison population are heroin and crack users who will remain in custody for three months or less – either serving short sentences, or on remand. They are not in the system long enough to undergo these residential programmes.Well, there's a solution to that, Paul, but I don't think you're gonna like it...
Good clinical practice will either continue the treatment the prisoner had before arrest, or prepare them for the treatment they will receive on the outside. Otherwise individuals would be vulnerable to suicide while they were in custody, and to overdose on release.Hmm, that's a self-correcting problem, no?
Johnson's antipathy to methadone ignores the fact that it is the first-line treatment for opiate addiction recommended by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.Oh, right.
Well, we all know how good they are at making decisions that bear no relation to budgetary concerns, oh dear me, no...
Having to visit a prisoner recently serving 'life' was an eye opener. He told me that inside you can get phones, phone cards, sims, booze, skunk, heroin, cocaine, speed etc etc. It is a joke! If these bastards actually served proper, full term sentences it might actually be beneficial to prisoners and society in a number of ways that are bleeding obvious....except to the apparatchiks quoted.
ReplyDelete"Don't drug addicts bear some responsibility for them? "
ReplyDeleteNo.
By definition, an addict doesn't do responsibility.
Also note that Iran (home of the rabid mullahs) applies sharia to smackheads and still, Iran has the most junkies in the world.
So the idea that if you're tough enough on them they'll straighten up is also a non-starter, they are already far tougher on themselves than you'd ever have the stomach for.
Lastly, take a look at the long term success rate of rehab for addicts -- no matter what it is, barbs, alc, glue, smack, crack, meths -- the rehab rate is tiny.
Those people like the woffle-brother who wrote that piece of bumpf know all this very well, but no-one is allowed to say openly that the entire thing is a total fail, hence they spout some incoherent rubbish instead.
Btw, look up 'jeu du foulard' -- you'll find that kids are killing themselves with self strangulation games on a regular basis.
Drugs are merely a prop/decoy, it's the addicts themselves who are the problem...
"If these bastards actually served proper, full term sentences it might actually be beneficial to prisoners and society in a number of ways..."
ReplyDeleteWell, if the rehab success rates are so small, as Fat Hen points out, then at least by serving long sentences, society is getting a respite from them while inside...
"By definition, an addict doesn't do responsibility."
Increasingly, it's hard to tell the addicts from anyone else on that score!
"...no-one is allowed to say openly that the entire thing is a total fail, hence they spout some incoherent rubbish instead."
They need to be kept in a job, after all.
"Btw, look up 'jeu du foulard' -- you'll find that kids are killing themselves with self strangulation games on a regular basis."
Wasn't that a panic in the papers just a week or so ago? I seem to remember that craze going around when I was at school too...