Giving addicts their civil right to help
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Addiction Response Crumlin recognises that the causes of heroin addition are linked to social injustice and inequality in our society. We believe, however, that people can and do recover from addiction and go on to reach their full potential.
Addiction Response Crumlin (ARC)
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The following is based on an interview with Susan Collins of Addiction Response Crumlin (ARC) in Dublin, which is working in an innovative and community-based way to to help young drug addicts and their families to recover and rebuild their lives
AT THE TIME of Dublin's early anti-drugs marches in the 1980s there was nothing available to help addicts to get off drugs or cope with their addiction. There was an 18-day detox at Trinity Court, which can only be described as `setting them up to fail', making addiction all the harder to cope with. And then there was Coolmine and Cherry Orchard, with only a few beds each. People had to be clean to get taken on.
We started the Butterfly project, which became Addiction Response Crumlin (ARC), three years ago.
I'd always been involved. My brother died of an overdose. After 18 months off it, he got stuff off his so-called friends. But through him I had seen how drug users were treated - like shit, dirt. You were a number on a conveyor belt - in and out - to get your physeptone (`phy'). Outside there was a line of pushers, you had to run the gauntlet. Pearse Street Garda Station, just down the road, did nothing to stop it. Nobody cared.
I went on a radio programme to talk about the situation. I had 50 addicts to my door in the following couple of weeks, looking for me to do something, to get support, for someone to speak up for them.
At the time there wasn't even a drugs counsellor in Crumlin. There were just two for the whole of Area 4 (Crumlin, Drimnagh, Walkinstown and Tallaght) who also had to deal with alcohol addiction.
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The service provided by ARC recognises the inter-dependence of the individual, the family and the community. ARC believes that addiction is an issue for the whole community and aims to raise community awareness of the problem, its impact and how to respond.
ARC statement
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The addicts had heard about the Cork Street drug centre opening. They were looking for something here. We started one day a week in the Community Hall in Crumlin, which the people round here had bought off the church years ago.
The old people didn't judge - they knew
Our local community here has been marvellous. We have got more support from them than anyone. We recently called up to 6,000 houses to tell them about our programme. There was great support, and especially amongst the old people, who you'd expect to be the most vulnerable and sensitive or apprehensive about anything to do with drugs. I suppose they'd seen it all. They didn't judge, but they knew the suffering. We found a lot of lonely people out there who appreciated what we are doing.
We said that we were going to help drugs users to get some stability in their lives and give them and their families some support in dealing with their dependency. When they came for help, which is a struggle in itself, then there would be someone there for them to turn to, someone who didn't think of them as scum, who wouldn't judge them.
At last we got two doctors who would work with us, and we set up a phy programme. An addict had to pay the doctor £15 per prescription, and £30 for his weekly supply. The doctors made big money out of it - it was criminal really, making money out of their need for a substitute drug. Then it was physeptone. Now it's methadone. It's a terrible drug, very addictive, but if it helps people to stabilise themselves and their life, then okay. You can't lay down a law on the best drug treatment programme. It is a question of what helps, what works. But what is essential is that there is support for the addicts, and their families.
Talking to addicts in a world that rejects them
We went for the `buddy' system, which we'd seen working in Tallaght. We started with volunteers looking after a few addicts each and supplying them with their phy, maybe with a daily call from the addict to the volunteer's house. These people were marvellous. It was a tremendous sacrifice of time, endless talking with the addict, giving the support they needed to keep up the programme. It was a very heavy demand on people's own lives.
Now we have outreach workers who visit addicts' houses two or three times a week, and even people who have completed the programme, are drug-free but still need support. And then they visit the centre three times a week, where we've doctors, nurses, counsellors, outreach workers, and now we've started all kinds of classes in English, literacy, drama, art, music, computer skills, women's groups, and men's groups, and so on. It's flexible. It's all centred around the addicts - they discuss what they want to have. It's their centre.
Then we have parents' meetings once a week, tea and a chat. Each day is a new struggle for them too. They cry together, they laugh together. You'd often listen to stories and you'd cry with them. The whole family is affected by drugs. The fear that their child will get put off because they lapsed, the guilt over breakdown, the pressures to slip.
We've a limit of 75 people on the programme. We've a waiting list of sometimes 50. Imagine, 50 people looking for help who we have to turn away. We reckon there are some 700 to 800 addicts in just this area of Crumlin alone.
Professionally-orchestrated `resistance'
Fifty of those on the programme at the moment have jobs. That speaks for itself. Others want training, the education they missed, and somewhere to be in the daytime. Three years ago, we set about to get a building for this.
After a long haul, the Salesian Order of Don Bosco, which is `dedicated to educational and developmental needs of youth', based in Crumlin, agreed to let us use a wing of their large house. We were over the moon. We spent £13,500 doing structural repairs, making it a pleasant environment for classes.
But some of the local residents didn't like it. The residents' committee of St Teresa's Road (chaired by a Garda) organised meetings, petitions, objections, and 50 questions to ARC. In an open, signed letter, the residents' committee wrote that Fr Foster, of the Salesians, had ``deceived, alienated and generally managed to upset every household on St Teresa's Road and indeed further afield, by what we perceive to be his omission to inform us of ongoing developments relating to the ARC project''. They told the local priest that he wouldn't be welcome in their houses if they went ahead with ARC. There was no talking to them. We tried.
The Salesians capitulated. They withdrew. They were ``staggered by the vehemence and anger of the response of the local communities'', the Salesians' Provincial, Fr John Horan (who has now left the house), explained in a letter to ARC. The few Salesians, all aged over 60, living in the house, felt they couldn't cope with living in an atmosphere ``with this level of anger and hostility in the local community''. It was opposition Fr Horan says was ``too well professionally orchestrated''.
Generation to generation
Many girls and fellows who are desperate to find the £300 a day to feed their habit turn to crime, and when they are too weak to rob, to prostitution, where they are often earning for two - themselves and the pimp. It takes a great deal of strength and stability to come to terms with this, to cope if you lapse, and especially when your family and your child are affected. We need to provide support, to help people to deal with this. It is almost impossible on your own, and you daren't socialise with your friends for fear that you'll go back on it.
We need a place to get the classes, the second-chance education, up and running. Some people with young children, trying to get stable, need this support so badly and don't have the confidence to go to their local VEC school. If it's not to go from one generation to the next, they need a creche, playgroup and homework club facilities, which they can afford. Three creches in the area have closed recently. The rest are too costly.
Young women who may have become addicted when they were just teenagers themselves, had a child, feel overburdening guilt at the damage they fear they have done to the child and their own, need support to hold out against `the anger and hostility' directed at them. Creche facilities are essential.
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PADDY (not his real name) is a lovely-looking fellow, quiet, intelligent, who talks easily about the hardest things. He has nearly finished the two-year programme with ARC. He has full-time work, lives with his girlfriend and she expects a baby shortly, which he proudly explains, they planned to have.
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ARC is struggling to open a creche-cum-playgroup and after-school centre on the Kimmage Road. Dublin Corporation gave planning permission - £71,000 has been allocated for structural repairs from the Drugs Task Force, National Drugs Strategy Team, and £40,000 from the Department of Justice Equality and Law Reform. But residents have appealed against the Corporation's decision to An Bord Pleanála. ARC awaits the outcome. If ARC doesn't get permission, then the money goes back, unused.
I WOULDN'T BE here if it wasn't for the programme. What's so good about it? It's because it's community-run, it's people who care, not just government-employed people there to do a job and go home. Really you are only a scumbag with a number to them. And the more numbers they can get through their meth programme, the better it all looks.
I've seen workers in this programme broken up, in tears after they had to suspend someone off the programme because they'd slipped. That's what makes this place - that it's a community. Drugs are everyone's problem, and they care about people on the programme.
I'll never forget the first time I called up to get my meth at the home of one of the programme workers. My worker wasn't there, but a son and his little child were. I was straightaway accepted; almost like one of the family. Nobody was judging me or afraid - like I had a disease. I was a human being. One of them.
Just to be normal
Trying to get stable is when you are trying just to be normal, to be able to sit down, watch the television, talk to people. It's the worst thing you ever had to go through. And worst of it is that you've no friends. All my friends from school except one were into drugs. You can't socialise with them any more. All the talk is about drugs, cops, shite talk. You have to leave them behind. You are isolated.
In my family, I did such awful things on them. I still can't talk to them about things. And the longer I stay clean, the harder it becomes to even think about this, what I did, to my sister, my mother. I was my mother's favourite. She did everything to help me get off. What she went through - even now I can't talk with her about it.
We're not lepers here
It's the hardest thing, when you slip, just to face yourself. That you've got to go through all that again. There are lots of my friends looking to get on the programme, and they can't. There just aren't enough programmes for the addicts who want off gear. When you have summoned up the strength to join a programme, it's then you need the support, not in three months' time. It's hard to accept you need help. Nobody can do it for you.
The addicts are hunted from pillar to post. If someone looks at you and thinks you are an addict, through fear mostly, they treat you like dirt. It's racism, like the way some people treat black people. We didn't bring in the drugs, its wasn't greed that got me and all my friends into addiction - we just needed a fix. People can't hide away from the problem. It's an issue for the whole community, that ARC has taken on. For once, you feel you are not a leper and the cause of everyone's problems.
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