Extra funding demanded for drug-rehab projects

The Government must provide additional funding in December’s budget for rehabilitation projects to tackle Dublin’s growing drugs crisis, campaigners said today.

CityWide Drugs Crisis Campaign called for greater resources for rehabilitation programmes to get people back to work and for an inter-agency approach to combat drug abuse in the capital and across the country.

CityWide co-ordinator Anna Quigley said there was a huge amount of publicity surrounding drug seizures and arrests but far too little attention focused on helping drug users.

“As well as all that action around supply, we need to see the resources invested on the ground,” she said.

She said the Government’s own midterm review of the National Drugs Strategy, published in June, found that one of the major gaps in the policy was the rehabilitation of drug users.

“We have 7,500 people on methadone, and the vast majority don’t have access to rehabilitation places.

“On its own, methadone is not a treatment and we need to have investment in rehabilitation.”

She also said drug users could have a whole range of issues, such as housing and childcare, which needed inter-agency action that often wasn’t forthcoming.

She said that even with all the agencies coming together, individual agencies did not have extra resources in their budgets.

“We’re saying in the Budget 2006 there needs to be an additional budget for rehabilitation.

“Show us that the resources will be there as well as the plans,” she said.

Ms Quigley was speaking at the launch by CityWide of a report – Drug Rehabilitation, A View from the Community – which details the work by drug rehab groups and makes recommendations on how services might be improved.

The report said while there were 7,637 people in drug treatment, there were just 1,120 rehabilitation places sponsored by employment agency FÁS, leaving only small numbers of people ready for work.

It said the Government’s working group on integrated drug rehabilitation services needed to learn from and build on the experience of community drug projects.

Jack O’Connor, general president of Siptu, which is supporting the campaign, said Ireland’s biggest union had a long history of supporting communities and helping former drug users back into employment.

“Workplace representatives ask us: 'How can we deal with this issue, how do we help people affected in one way or another, either directly or in family relationships, by drug abuse?’

“It’s an issue that comes up frequently at our conferences and our training courses.

“I wouldn’t suggest that it is the critical issue in the workplace, but it is present,” he said.