Class A Stupidity

With a great fanfare and lots of self-righteous backslapping the government just announced it had decided to upgrade methamphetamine - AKA Crystal Meth to a class A drug under the 1971 Misuse of drugs act. What does this mean we ask ourselves except heavier penalties for possession i.e. up to seven years in the jug? Not to mention dealing, supply and so on which gets you fourteen years.

What this means.

Greater profits for the people who make and distribute the stuff. This is because they increase their margins to take in to account the increased risks or penalties for getting caught.

Uprates the attractiveness of and interest in the drug by potential users. They don't get deterred by the penalties (if they did we wouldn't have anyone using smack). And making it VERY illegal and doing so with burst of publicity is like advertising that this is A DRUG WHICH WORKS in letters of fire 10 feet high. In short it creates a market/demand.

Increases the number of illicit factories making the drug in order to meet the demand. What this in turn does is increase the risks to the emergency services and communities. Not from the users of the drug but from the fact that the drug is made in domestic kitchens from some very iffy precursor chemicals which tend to blow up unexpectedly or leave a dangerous toxic sludge behind once the process is finished.

What it does not do is reduce the risks of illicit drug use or stop supply and possession. Shame really.

Gamble, Gamble, Gamble

Good grief, it's gambling madness out there. The media have (has?) suddenly woken up to the interesting fact that there is a new gambling act about to come in to play - so to speak. What we are seeing now is a classic addiction issue. An increase in availability of a drug, in this case gambling, inevitably leads to an increase in use of the drug with an inescapable fallout. By that I mean the social and health downside. More family breakdown, jobs lost, debt, crime, homelessness ...... But what the Australian experience of gambling liberalisation tells us is that despite the downside the government (of whatever hue) becomes itself addicted to the mothers' milk of hugely increased tax revenues. And they can't give it up.

Emergency Assistance

I've just read a couple of police blogs, most recently Totallyunpc http://totallyun-pc.blogspot.com/ which have been thoughtful and insightful pieces about the stresses and strains of police work. They include gripping and moving accounts of life-threatening events in which they were involved. Totallyunpc also had a think about whether or not counselling helps in the aftermath of such distressing circumstances. So I thought I would post today about some of my experiences of working with emergency service staff.

In my time (I used to be a nurse back in the day) I have been involved in emergencies - cutting down someone who had hung himself and walking in to a ward bathroom to find blood up the walls and a dying patient in the bath - slashed wrists. Amazingly we saved both of them but I still dream about them from time-to-time. So I'm not completely ignorant of the horrors that staff in 'extreme' occupations see. However, I have also seen a number of emergency service personnel in my current guise - working in the drugs and alcohol treatment field.

Usually they are self-referrals because naturally they're concerned about confidentiality and I have seen police officers mired in cocaine or alcohol, ambulance bods the same. In almost every case the person can link their drinking or drug taking to a specific and awful incident or series of incidents. Usually they have a history of social drinking or drug use which begins to escalate after attendances at incidents. Often they have also experienced feelings of desperation when unable to help a victim or a colleague who is in dire straits. What confuses people though is that often they don't begin to feel depressed or upset until quite some time after the event(s), by which time they're drinking too much or gobbling down tranquillisers or sometimes street drugs. This usually gets noticed by wives/husbands/girlfriends/boyfriends and they start to feel they are losing it. What also makes it doubly difficult for emergency staff to seek help are complicating factors such as:

• Pride - 'it's me that helps people not the other way round'.
• Fear: Of losing a job.
• Loss of face in front of other colleagues, especially in the stiff upper lip, make a joke of it culture of some services.

and so on. But in fact what is often the case is that they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, what used to be called shell-shock by the armed services. PTSD usually appears some months after the event(s) and is often a complete surprise to the victim who had thought they were ok thankyou. By the time they end up with me though they have probably been to the GP and been misdiagnosed or just given pills or wrongly diagnosed as having a drink or drug problem. Where the good work comes in by experienced and thoughtful drug treatment staff is to help the worker understand what has happened to them and why and to give practical help with the drink and drug use. This coupled with quality counselling which helps the worker talk through their distress and upset and maybe some anti-depressants can solve the problem most of the time. Sometimes the person returns to active duty and is fine or sometimes they recognise that time's up and to save their sanity they should do something else.

And sometimes it helps just to write it all down.

Sniffing notes

In today's news is the useful fact that 100% of Irish Euro notes are contaminated with cocaine powder. It varies in strength from VERY contaminated, i.e. been used for snorting purposes; to only a bit, which suggests the note has been somewhere where cocaine is too.

So here we are, Ireland's famed Guinness drinking habit seems to be on the verge of losing out to a coke (that's cocaine not the other sorts) habit. Or perhaps not, after all cocaine does improve one's appetite for alcohol too. But I think it's just a sign of the times. A successful economy brings with it more spare cash. And one thing which you can spend it on is drugs. So I suspect we will see major job opportunities for people like me in Ireland in the next few years.

Here we see a picture of a famous dog who could be coked up - note the speed and the gritted teeth. Probably heading for Ireland.

I promise not to arrest anyone

Continuing on my current theme about police blogging. I'm beginning to get a bit obsessed by it/them. Some of them really are very funny as are some of the comments they generate. But when they stray in to commenting on my area of expertise they are often free and easy with inaccurate views and information. A particular hobby horse is the oft-held police view that all drug users are 'slags, chavs, hopeless-criminals-for-whom-treatment-is-a-soft-option-and-anyway-it-doesn't-work' and so on.

I don't pretend to be an expert on the law or even on the police and their work. But I do know a great deal about drugs and drug treatment and I know that treatment works and that there is a huge amount of evidence to show that's the case. I also know that enforcement has by and large failed to reduce drug use despite the huge disparity between what gets spent on drug enforcement (A LOT) and what gets spent on treatment (not very much in comparison) . Yes, we can understand the police's frustration when they arrest yet another person who is using drugs and thieving to support their habit who claims to be in treatment. But this doesn't mean the treatment can't or won't work given the right treatment and the right circumstances. It's just that the police mostly don't know enough about how treatment works or how to get people in to it, this despite the advent of arrest referral schemes, DTTO's (Drug Treatment and Testing Orders) etc.

And this brings me to the nub of my concerns over police commenting on treatment. They're not qualified to do so, but their comments still carry the authority that goes with the uniform and gullible people reading their blogs will believe them without challenge.

So, if I promise not arrest anyone will they hold back on comments about drug treatment and its efficacy? Doubt it but you never know.