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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

Life Suspended - the madness of UK Drug Treatment

Great stuff, Amnesia..need to fix the sound on my computer but look forward to seeing you and the bear baiter.

Of course you'd be cut short. The only way to ensure an unedited, pro heroin appearance in today's UK media is to be right off your face and make a complete tit of yourself. Announce you're ''clean'' and the host invariably asks the audience to give you a loud round of applause. It's what you call a sloping playing field.

Up to 200mg? The European average is closer to 450. On top of methadone? Ah well, I suppose we must make allowances for the political climate and any diamorphine is better than none. But I do hope that, if the non meth-heads score on top because they're not getting enough for their habits, it doesn't give abstentionists and Wired-In types the opportunity to say " Look! You see? There's no point in prescribing them they carry on scoring", as they do already to decry methadone handouts.

Don't get me started on Dalrymple. He's put on weight since, but when we met, we even looked similar. I thought he was a great guy, questioned everything and a refereshingly honest change from the usual Treatment automoton. If you were right, he'd acknowledge it and if he disagreed he'd go into his reasons and discuss it with you. Not a 'go through the motions' type, wrote me long letters on style and literary matters. Ambitious, well read, well traveled and energetic. Great fan of Shakespeare, very down on Marx and Communism.

Since then, he's added multiculturism, political correctness, Islamic extremism and suppression of women, promiscuity, illiteracy, tattooing, club doorman, ill disciplined teenagers, leftish intellectuals, all leftists, sentimentality( 'Dianafication'), government bureaucracies, education policies, liberal policemen, rap music and about a thousand other things to his list of grievances. Not above being controversial to make a point. Has since allowed there are exceptions to his generalisations about addiction. Unfortunately not before the cats he let out of the bag strayed to a bad home and he became the intellectual justification for the kind of trend following, unthinking consultant he himself was at great pains not to be. Although now retired and living most of the time in France, still a regular contributor to City Journal, New Criterion and broadsheet newspapers as well as author of social commentary books. There may yet be more to come from him.

Where else in the country are diamorphine prescriptions or places on RIOTT type trials available? What happens nowadays in the Wirral? I'd heard there was a trial in Darlington, anyone from those parts or the Brighton area with anything to report? By now, I expected Pink Papaver to have brought diamorphine prescription to every town in the land but, with a son and Aston Villa to support, we must make allowances.
 
RIOTT trials are in Darlington, Brighton and London (although not sure which area). Don't have a lot of info on the the others outside of Brighton though I'm afraid and the clients are always asked about other drug use before being given their DM. Most seem very honest, there are the occasiocal slips but jesus, they're in a fuck lot of a better state than before.

Urine testing also happens but it's non-punitive and doesn't lead to an automatic reduction or reappraisal of their treatment.


I'd be quite interested in getting a good solid users forum together for heroin users to try and get some solidarity going and to be able to lobby certain offices within government. Not sure on the best way forward with this, maybe you'd have some ideas?

I'm also pretty shit with anythin past looking at forums and selling shit on ebay but I could learn pretty quick.
 
Therein lies the rub, Amnesiaseizure. Any other 300,000 strong group with the same single concern and there's be one powerful lobby. But addicts don't give a fuck. Maybe it's the nature of the thing.

There are a lot of good people with habits. A lot of rubbish as well. The former tend to stay low and the latter to hog the headlines. If you lobby for one, you lobby for t'other and invite a whole lot of hassle.

That's why so many 'user groups' are so top heavy with ex-users you could prosecute under the Trades Description Act anywhere else. But this is UK Drug Treatment, where very little is at is seems. Yes, thoughtful user groups are badly needed, on both local and national levels. But it's thankless work and the charity bread isn't generally hurled at independent-thinking addicts.

In what direction could a solid group go?
 
Yeah so i'm fucked 4 the day.
In the rush of things n not getting alot of time with my GP , i was trying to sort out my script to go on holiday.
This envolves getting my liquid prepartions in pill form and getting acovering letter easy , it should be.

Well i've royaly fuked it up , when offered an appt at 15:10 i said yeah, what astupid thing to say.
Know i've got to wait till 15:10 b4 i can get anything and i got nothing i say nothing for 8 hours , what a fuk up.
I'm so pissed off with ny self 4 not being on the ball , i usually make sure about serious stuff like this .
So i'm ill already n its not even 7:30:!
Which is making me think fuk it when i see the CNT i'm gonna hit 4 extra drugs , or maybe even up my methadone , i ' really serious about this cos its ment to hold you 24hours i'm lucky if i get 16 , this would be a huge backward or sideway step but i'm seriously considering it.
 
Bit of a scandal when you think of the useless activities in which your key (ok, in your case GP, but I'm making a point here) will be engaged during those 8 hours. All those meaningless, duplicious conversations with users who'd rather be on the nod elsewhere. Think of the money it's costing the taxpayers. Wotta waste. If it won't prescribe, Treatment would be more successful if it handed the loot directly over to addicts and empowered them to score.

I consider opening the Clean Agency to fill the seemingly insatiable demand for practising addicts on daytime tv chat shows. Girls willing to flash the baps to entice gullible producers are particularly welcome. Once on camera, everyone covers up and gets real serious, the time has come to tell it like it is. Any telegenic types ready for some media agit-prop and a shot at the big time out there in BL land?
 
A friend of mine (not a hypothetical friend mind) was hooked on codeine and had to plead with his doctor to get bupe since they were adamant that Methadone was the way to go - protocol of course. Can you imagine a codeine addict going onto methadone - fucked up. These drug centers are peopled by robots who just turn the cogs and hold the system in place. Doctors who are willing to experiment are few and far between and even then they must operate within "paramters" for no other reason than the system is sacred and its rules sacrosanct - never mind that the system is there to serve the populace.
 
nice to see one of the best serious threads in EADD front page. All be it 4 bad reasons , well the title is a give away.
Was gonna post in it t'other day but couldn't find it .
 
Nice to see the old thread back on Page One.

While things have quietened down here, we can't claim to have changed any entrenched attitudes. Although in all but one case our scripts were saved by the '2nd opinions' of experienced addictions specialists the 10-25% lost before the DAAT/NTA halted the 'enforced reductions' has not been returned. We've received no apologies and those responsible now claim all the lies and duplicity were to 'help' us and it's not their fault if we're too ungrateful to take it. Opiophobes are strange people; they deny addiction realities and say it's the drug user who is ' in denial'. In the name of recovery would destroy any recovery that's medically assisted.

And as for the idea of legal heroin for heroin addicts, well, that's still considered to be a very quixotic notion. Far better they're made into de facto criminals. It's a grand comment on our society that we'd rather imprison people than allow them to change their own consciousnesses. Drug Treatment remains a postcode lottery - there are RIOTT trials in Green Brighton while in other areas you won't get a lousy subutex - and time marches on. Privatised drug service providers are meant to follow the Orange guidelines but many put company interests first. 'Recovery' organisers hand out purple bows and set off purple balloons for want of better idea. With users generally in the dark about how it's meant to be and very little in the way of regulation, the band plays on and 40 years of policy failure will soon become 41.

Ah well, it'll all come out in the wash, as they say.
 
Jarvis hit the nail

Jarvis Cocker put it brilliantly, even if that wasn't exactly what he was writing about:
You will never understand
How it feels to live your life
Without meaning or control
And with nowhere elsep to go
You are amazed that they exist
And they burn so bright
Whilst you can only wonder why
And I'm going to have to listen to Different Class all the way through. S#!t, was it really so long ago?
 
Good old Jarvis.

Interesting someone bumps this thread. I was contemplating doing so myself to reflect the complaints of posters in Treatment on other sites. Seems a number of services - particularly CRI, that creation of retired judges and probation officers - choose to miss out the government acknowledgment of the validity of 'medically assisted recovery' and are pushing users off their scripts anywhichway without concern for the consequences. Many users find the black market an easier option to trying to stand up to dsp pressure and spurious moral condemnation. They are then reported as having 'successfully discharged' treatment and the lie is perpetuated.

We've a strange situation here where a group of private companies, under the misleading 'charity' banner, now control 75% of UK Drug Treatment. Their concerns are rarely exclusively medical. With names like Crime Reduction Initiatives, you don't need a degree to guess where they're coming from. In a quiet sedition, they can be somewhat selective when it comes to advising users of their options. They often claim their agendas to be those of 'the government'. They're not. But uninformed users can form the impression that 'maintenance', no matter how well it works, is no longer an alternative. Be informed and don't let them give you a problem where one did not previously exist. They are there to help you, not you to help them. And, to quote a poster elsewhere, if you challenge their lies, deceit, lack of compassion and lust for the fast buck, they're far more likely to treat you properly than if you try to be nice to them.


[edit] But by now drug users expect so little from their dsps the thread is of no relevance to them. Half the time, they don't even know whether they're run by the NHS or a private 'charity'. If they're young enough to be able, they'll score instead. Rather a sad subversion of what's meant to be the point of treatment but there you go.
 
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i know exactly where your coming from, kid.. 20years i've been matinenced on meth and dexamphetemine, and i've done ok.. and i can honestly say if it wasn't for that i would not be here today.. now suddendly the arseholes ,who haven't got a fukin clue. have decided to cut my amphet script.. recon it ain't the government guidelines to prescribe it anymore! What?? but it has been for the last 20years!! . i'm dead in the water here mate. i just don't know where to go from here.. my doctors retired, any ov my decent workers keep gettin med redundant, they're shuttin my mental health/substance abuse clinic down,just been told.and now they're tryin to palm me off to god knows where.
 
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