Flawed drug strategy costs lives

THIS week a decomposing body was discovered in a derelict house in Co Kildare. It was that of a young woman who had been missing for a fortnight.

Lynette McKeown’s life made for dismal reading. She was an occasional prostitute. She was a recovering heroin user who may have relapsed. The last time she was seen alive was in the red light area around Arbour Hill.

Her family denied that. They said they had once lived in a B&B there. That, in itself, told its own story about the horizons of her life.

She was a mother of a young child. But then, you realised that she was hardly more than a child herself. Nineteen years of age.

Her story, like a struck match, flared for a little while in the media early in the week before quickly petering out. Poverty, opiate addiction and prostitution all conspired to make it an “unshocking” tragedy.

Hers was a blighted, failed life. But was it others who had failed her?

The other story that book-ended the week may partially answer that question. In its annual report for 2003, Merchants Quay said that 600 new drug users knocked on its door for the first time. A total of 3,331 users used their service last year, an increase of 5% on the previous year.

Director Tony Geoghegan wasn’t in the mood to flatter his sponsors, the Government. “This level of continued problem drug use shows what happens when a Government fails to resource its own strategy,” was his curt summation of what that meant.

Like other societal problems, efforts to deal with Ireland’s drugs problem often seems to be of the order of grappling with an octopus with both hands tied behind your back.

Heroin use is most prevalent in poorer areas. You fight not just against drugs but against criminality, poverty traps, social and educational disadvantage. And a leaden feeling of helplessness that the problem self-perpetuates is passed on from generation to generation. And those areas are no longer the usual Dublin pockmarks.

It has been decentralised.

Geoghegan said that progress on the strategy had “apparently ground to a halt” since the Government’s National Drug Strategy first made an impact.

A freeze on funding since 2001 has effectively meant a cutback. Departing staff have not been replaced because of a moratorium on recruitment. And though there are now some 7,000 people on methadone replacement programmes (compared with 2,000 three years ago), we are left with the ridiculous situation that there are fewer staff now than when the number of addicts receiving ‘meths’ was two-thirds less.

If that wasn’t enough, promises to provide more needle exchanges haven’t materialised, nor have pharmacy-based exchanges. These are important not only for reducing the risk of contracting disease from contaminated needles. As Geoghegan said yesterday, they act like a “carrot to pull people into services.”

Noel Ahern, the junior minister with responsibility for the strategy, bumbled his way through Morning Ireland yesterday, complaining that Geoghegan was being “unduly negative”. The fact that there was 7,000 addicts in the methadone programme showed that the strategy was a success, he claimed.

But is it? Methadone, in itself, is no long-term solution. It’s merely a half-way house on the road to recovery. For now, agencies hoping to move recovering addicts onto the next step can forget about it. There’s no money in the pot.

Despite Ahern’s defence, the Government is treading water, keeping the problem at an acceptable level of vileness. Nor does it follow that the number of active drug users has fallen dramatically. Serious drug abuse outside Dublin continues to increase worryingly. When it came to resources and funding, Ahern kind of gave the game away when he said that Health also had “other priorities.”

The Government’s favourite tactic is to wow us with statistics on how damn good everything is.

Here are a couple of other statistics to go along with. Approximately 80% of intravenous drug users have been infected with Hepatitis C. Some 47 of those notified as contracting HIV last year were drug-users. The number of drug addicts is higher now than it was during the heroin epidemic in Dublin in the 1980s.

And then they tell us, a la Harold MacMillan, that we have never had it so good. You wonder if the young victim Lynette McKeown ever had it any better than grim.