They said what..?
Spotlight on the national media
use drugs and fall into the sphere of
substance misuse services is a grim
indictment of modern psychiatry,
because no one goes into substance
misuse treatment if they have
another option. Gabor Maté’s ideas
around trauma and addiction would
suggest an even higher percentage
of service users are suffering.
Put simply, people don’t go into
treatment to keep the party going,
for free dope. Considering the
modern treatment service, it can
easily be construed that you have to
be desperate to sign up. So it would
be great if the drugs that enable
clients to function and provide
much needed stability were not
seen as a vice or pleasure, but rather
seen as just medication.
I’ll probably be burned at
the stake for mentioning it, but
demonisation of drugs and the
pleasure they can impart is seen
far too often in recovery settings.
I appreciate the seriousness of
recovery, but if your schtick involves
demonising drugs and pleasure
to maintain one’s own recovery
it might be time to find another
narrative.
Our negative attitude to pleasure
can even be seen to limit the
effectiveness of what little harm
reduction we practise. The work
of Magdalena Harris, associate
professor at the London School
of Hygiene and Tropical medicine
MediaTrading/iStock
and a leading researcher, suggests
that the most effective forms of
harm reduction tend to fall around
ways to extend pleasurable drug
use rather than the much more
common and more ineffective
‘wages of sin are death/do this or
die’ approach.
A more civilised attitude to
pleasure would change things,
and our only chance of this is a
full and frank discussion around
pleasure and our attitude to it. An
inability to accept pleasure is the
elephant in the room. It leads to
stigma, poor drug treatment and
poor relationships between services
and service users. This, sadly, won’t
change until there’s been a debate
– and considering the subject, it will
be a painful debate.
My contribution to this debate
is this. Since mankind came down
from the trees we’ve wandered
around, and when hungry we ate
some of the plentiful plants. Some
plants nourished us, so we kept
eating them. Some plants poisoned
us, so we stopped eating those.
And some plants – special plants –
made us feel good… really good. We
definitely kept eating them!
You have to accept pleasure is a
very human problem, because only
mankind would make pleasure a
problem. Most animals, wisely, just
enjoy it.
Nick Goldstein is a service user
THE DECISION to scrap Public
Health England in the middle
of a pandemic that has claimed
65,000 British lives is cynical
and wrong… it is not a failing
institution and its weaknesses
reflect years of Conservative cuts.
Guardian editorial, 18 August
THIS BUNCH OF NANNYING
NO-MARKS enjoy an annual
budget of £300m and legions of
bosses enjoy six-figure salaries,
but ask yourself this: for all that
cash, apart from eating an extra
apple, how has your life been
improved?
Nick Ferrari, Express, 23 August
THE PRIME MINISTER AND HIS
MERRY BAND OF FELLOWS seem
to care about alcohol in so far
as the effects it has on people’s
waistlines – last week they
announced plans for calorie
labelling on booze… – but there
appears to be precious little
concern for the effects it has on
people’s brains and lives. It could
even be argued that the folks
in charge actively encourage
the drinking of alcohol, not just
in their desperation to reopen
pubs over and above almost
everything else, but also in their
trashing of alcohol and drug
services.
Bryony Gordon, Telegraph,
8 August
PEOPLE WHO USE DRUGS are
perceived to have self-inflicted
the psychological and physical
pain they experience. We see
them as deviant. This lazy and
widely held attitude is not
discreet, and the shame and
stigma do little to promote
recovery from addiction. We
don’t need to look far to see
where our national empathy
really lies – the suffering of
cats and dogs always triggers
a better response than one for
those trapped by addiction.
Ian Hamilton, Independent,
14 July
The decision
to scrap Public
Health England
in the middle
of a pandemic
that has claimed
65,000 British lives
is cynical and
wrong… it is not a
failing institution
and its weaknesses
reflect years of
Conservative cuts.
IN A WAY, I’M GLAD we don’t
legalise drugs in this country.
Because – and you’ll have to
excuse me for making one of
history’s tiredest arguments
– look what we did with that
incredibly dangerous substance
alcohol: we had a choice between
strict regulation and building a
towering culture entirely around
it, and chose the latter. Could you
imagine just how unbearable
drugs culture would be in this
country if it was legalised?
Second-wedding hen-do mums
with ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ etched
across a TK Maxx bong; hard lads
in pub gardens arcing bottles
of poppers in the air every time
Harry Kane scores a penalty;
entire counties ready to fight
each other – the way Devon and
Cornwall argue about the order
the jam is supposed to go on a
scone – over whether a bump of
cocaine is better than a line. This
is why we can’t legalise drugs in
this country. It’s nothing to do
with moral panic, and everything
to do with cultural decline.
Joel Golby, Guardian, 22 July
WWW.DRINKANDDRUGSNEWS.COM SEPTEMBER 2020 • DRINK AND DRUGS NEWS • 11