The State's approach to dealing with drug addiction lacks imagination and creativity, the director of the largest voluntary drug treatment centre has said.
Speaking at the close of a 10-day awareness campaign on drug addiction, Mr Tony Geogheghan, of the Merchants Quay Project, Dublin, said the State's policies on heroin addiction remained overly centred on methadone maintenance programmes.
These policies lacked flexibility and a vision of how to move addicts beyond their addiction.
"Providing widespread access to methadone was legitimate five years ago when the heroin situation was such a crisis, but we need to move beyond that now," said Mr Geoghegan.
Official estimates put the number of addicts in Dublin at 15,000, although Mr Geoghegan believes this to be nearer 30,000.
He said stabilising chaotic addicts was necessary, but after that there should be far greater availability of counselling, training, education "and other ancillary services to help addicts move beyond their addiction".
"We are not seeing that and we are not seeing any indication that that situation is likely to change in the short term," he said.
There were just 200 residential treatment beds for the 15,000 or more heroin addicts and that the ratio of counsellors to addicts at State centres remained very low.
He called for all methadone programmes to include quarterly reviews with each client in an effort to engage them in moving beyond methadone and for greater flexibility in the types of drug substitute offered to addicts trying to get off heroin.
While methadone was the substitute of State choice here, there were other options, including buprenorphine, from which the withdrawal symptoms were said to be less severe than from methadone, and so easier to give up, or morphine or other codeine-based products.
He also proposed a change in the medical protocol which says that the anti-overdose drug, naloxone, must be administered by a doctor. If this could be administered by paramedics attending emergency overdose cases, then lives would be saved, he said.
