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