The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 280 No 7491 p246
1 March 2008

This article
Reprint   Photocopy

PDF 60K, Acrobat Reader

• Retention fees
• Contracts
• Prescription charges
• Responsible pharmacist
• Community pharmacy (4)
• Emergency contraception (2)
• The Society (2)
• Drug addiction

Letters to the Editor

Drug addiction

Substance misuse treatment benefits the whole of society

From Mr V. S. Matousek, MRPharmS

It is with interest that I read the recent correspondence about drug addiction. I work in a specialist drug treatment centre. The clients tend to range through a whole spectrum, from those who are well educated, know what they are doing, have decided to try drugs for one reason or another and found themselves to have a problem, right through to those brought up in extremely chaotic and dysfunctional environments.

The lives some of these people have led can seem shocking and can include drug-misusing parents, lack of parenting, abuse, homelessness, concurrent psychiatric conditions and a complete sense of hopelessness. They may grow up in an environment where drug use and associated crime are not seen as wrong.

Many of these individuals have never had the opportunity to develop the same sense of right and wrong as most PJ readers will have had and it is all too easy for us, who have generally had good opportunities in life, to stand in judgement of these people.

Many people these days are all too ready to deny responsibility for their own actions and society tends to condone this, but we must recognise that people have varying capacities to take on responsibility. We do not expect, for example, people with severe recognised mental illness to take responsibility for their lives.

In reality, there is a continuum of personality types and human experience, from what is considered normal right through to severely mentally ill, and the classifications are purely artificial and put in place by us to make it more convenient for us to know how to treat people. But anyone who has worked in this area will have seen that these classifications do not always work.

We are taught to have compassion for people with defined illnesses but should we not all have compassion for one another? Do we need a label to tell us whether we should have compassion for a person or not?

Most people can use some help at some time in their lives and substance misuse services are there to offer support for anyone with these particular issues, as well as the follow on benefits of harm reduction, eg, crime reduction. This benefits the whole of society.

So we could all take the attitude of R. C. Jacob (PJ, 2 February 2008, p120) that people who bring things on themselves should cope with the consequences themselves (and the same could be said for diseases associated with smoking and unhealthy eating). However often people, through no fault of their own, do not have the opportunity to understand these things as we do, so I find this unhelpful in a civilised society.

V. S. Matousek
London

Send your letter to The Editor

Previous Topic (The Society)