OpiniOn
A New Frontier
Seven years ago I, along with several hundred drug treatment workers, sat at CRI’ s( now CGL) annual conference and listened to the opening speech by CEO David Royce. The mood was positive. Money was coming into the sector, CRI was growing month by month and treatment centres were, on the whole, robustly staffed.
David stood centre stage and whilst enthusiastically praising staff for their continued hard work and commitment, he delivered a stark warning to the room. The future might not be so bright for drug treatment – we must be careful, prepared and fluid. The money that the sector relied upon might not be ring-fenced in the years to come, and we must be ready to change. It might be that treatment needed to branch out and look for money elsewhere. It was likely there would be fewer jobs, and higher caseloads.
Six years later when I was sat in a council meeting listening to the proposed cuts to the treatment budget in York, the reality of the situation finally hit me. Of the four councillors in front of me, one was unashamedly falling asleep. Another, who despite having taken the time to research the subject, asked questions with next to no passion or concern for the excessive reductions in funding. The whole process was a formality, with no press coverage and no real challenge from treatment, all overseen by a powerless commissioner watching the precious budget slip through their hands like sand.
Having left treatment and now working in policy, I have spent a lot of time considering how this situation can be reversed. How can services reach previous levels of funding? What needs to be done to stop the budget cuts? In order to answer these questions the first step is to accept a cold hard truth. The public are not concerned by a reduction in drug treatment budgets. The heroin cohort single-handedly created, funded and sustained treatment for years. From concerns around the spread of blood-borne viruses to drug-related offending, providing treatment with money was not a political hot potato – it simply made sense.
Years later, heroin deaths are at an all-time high, treatment services have seen record budget cuts and there has been no significant public fallout. While it is easy to blame austerity and government, the truth is that the majority of the PHE budget is happily spent elsewhere – a decision ignored by local communities and the media. As the
‘ If services around the country looked up from managing the heroin cohort and engaged treatment-naive groups then the money would emerge...’
16 | drinkanddrugsnews | April 2018 www. drinkanddrugsnews. com