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‘I
will never make apologies for being
emotive about something that affects us
all,’ said Noreen Oliver MBE, opening
Creating Recovery
, The Recovery Group
UK’s conference in London last month.
The conference’s strapline was ‘funding
opportunities for building abstinence recovery
communities’ and the politicians were there to tell
us why ‘recovery’ now meant ‘drug free’.
‘It’s about getting people as far from drugs as
we possibly can,’ said work and pensions secretary,
Iain Duncan Smith. ‘It’s all about giving people a
chance, but with the discipline and determination to
move people into recovery.’
Rosanna O’Connor of Public Health England
stressed that there continued to be ‘high ministerial
interest’ in this agenda, but warned that drug
treatment money was likely to be squeezed even
further now its ‘quasi ringfence’ had been removed,
with community care funding ‘a particular challenge’.
A rehab survey had confirmed a solid basis for local
authorities to continue investing in them, but holding
LAs to account would be ‘slightly more difficult’.
‘These are challenging times with funding
constraints and potential disinvestments. We all
need to up our game,’ she said.
Lord Benjamin Mancroft, chair of the Addiction
Recovery Foundation and a peer in the House of
Lords for 27 years, who had beaten his own
addiction, was unequivocal that recovery meant
abstinence, and that those who disagreed did so
because they did not understand.
‘The healthcare profession can’t cure addiction,’
he said. ‘Doctors do not understand addiction – it’s
not in their radar.’ The problem, he said, was that
95 per cent of healthcare was provided by one
organisation, the NHS, controlled by doctors. That
organisation was ‘the most dangerous dealer in the
world’, for prescription drugs.
‘After 30 years of very careful observation, I
understand abstinence and substitute prescribing.
But I have never met anyone who’s benefited from
substitute prescribing for any but a very short
length of time,’ he said.
Christian Guy, of the Centre for Social Justice,
brought the discussion back to equality and giving
‘every person in the country the choices we would
want for our families.’ We should all agree that
people should be given the choice to get drug free
and stay drug free, he said.
The climate was becoming tougher without
money, with more than half of local authorities
cutting money for rehab.
‘As much as we hate to believe it, politics does
matter,’ he said. ‘But it’s not just about money, it’s
about lack of ambition for too many people in the
system.’
We also needed to know what recovery looked
like in later life, he said, as this group were in
danger of being forgotten and written off, with the
attitude ‘keep them quiet’ and ‘put them in shooting
galleries where the rest of us can’t see them.’
With ‘more people in rehab for alcohol than
drugs’, we were also not good enough at treating
the root causes of the 1.6m people trapped in
alcohol addiction.
‘Rehab is a chance to live again and surely
that’s what recovery is about,’ he added. ‘Let’s go
out with renewed determination to finish the job
and give people that chance.’
Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of Kids
Company, warned of the need to ‘stop simplistic
narratives of blame’ that were affecting children
and young people. Of the 36,000 young people,
children and vulnerable adults KidsCo supported
every year, 81 per cent arrived addicted to drugs
and 90 per cent of them had been introduced to
drugs by their immediate carers.
‘Potentially, this country it sitting on an
emotional and public health timebomb in the way
that it’s not paying attention to the urgency of care
for the most vulnerable,’ she said. ‘We should be
thinking about the emotional health and practical
living circumstances of our children.
‘We tend to think about recovery across the
whole spectrum in “siloed” ways, but often people’s
difficulties are complex and multiple and they have
continuous challenges as they go through their
recovery programme.’
*****
Against this backdrop of political, strategic and
economic anxiety, there was a strong message of
optimism and a proactive climate in the audience,
many of whom had come to demonstrate their active
recovery. ‘There’s a hell of a lot of power in the
18 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| February 2014
Recovery |
Creating Recovery conference
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘I will
never make
apologies
for being
emotive.’
NOREENOLIVER
‘The
healthcare
profession
can’t cure
addiction.’
LORDBENJAMIN
MANCROFT
‘Visible
change
happenswhen
we harness
strength’
STUARTHONOR
‘These are
challenging
times... We
all need to
up our game.’
ROSANNAO’CONNOR