R
elease has been providing vital legal advice on drugs issues, as
well as campaigning for reform of the drugs laws, since the late
1960s. Last month saw Niamh Eastwood take over from Sebastian
Saville as executive director, ten years after joining the
organisation as a legal adviser. She had initially trained as a
barrister but took time out to decide if that was what she really
wanted to do, and was teaching at a university when the position at Release
came up. ‘I was always quite political and I was interested in working for an NGO
and campaigning,’ she says. ‘I’d studied law in order to try to help people who
were vulnerable, or who’d been treated unjustly in some way.’
Growing up in Northern Ireland, she’d seen people ‘caught by the police for
very minor drug offences and it having a hugely negative impact on their lives’,
while at the same time realising that the drug laws provided little deterrent to
people actually taking drugs. ‘I was always aware that the current drug system
was an absolute failure,’ she says.
However, it was when she started to deliver Release legal surgeries in
treatment centres in London that she began to feel a much more powerful sense
of injustice. ‘I saw the people who were really impacted upon as a result of the
whole policy, people who were incredibly vulnerable and who in the majority of
cases had been traumatised in some way – through childhood experiences,
sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect. It was very clear that you were dealing
with people who often were taking drugs to self-medicate, and criminalising
them meant creating a system that punished them further.’
What they needed instead was to be treated in a way that was ‘non-
judgemental and gave respect and support to improve their lives’, she says,
support that could come through relatively small things such as helping to
improve their housing or resolving legal issues, in order to provide some level of
stability. ‘For me it was a real social justice issue.’
She was appointed head of legal services in 2007, and became Release’s deputy
director the following year. What does she consider the most significant
developments she’s seen in her time at the organisation? ‘Certainly what we’ve
welcomed over the last ten years has been the increase in investment in drug
treatment services, but coupled with that has been this really intensive approach to
diverting people from the criminal justice system into treatment through coercion –
court orders, arrest referral schemes and so on. Again, I would have thought that
just creates a greater stigma for people affected by problematic drug use.’
On a wider policy scale, however, she’s excited by the growing support for legal
reform. ‘It really feels that there’s a sea change, and we’re hopefully getting to a
point in the next few years where politicians will feel they can discuss this issue
and start to properly evaluate it,’ she says. ‘There’s a real change in how we’re
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drinkanddrugsnews
| February 2012
Profile |
Niamh Eastwood
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com