Sir, - Catherine Cleary's informative article (The Irish Times, February 16th) on the new Methadone Protocol Programme introduced by the Eastern Health Board on October 1st last indicated:
1. That at least 455 known patients with addiction problems in the EHB region are currently waiting for access to treatment programmes - 70 more than in 1997.
2. That each of the persons she interviewed had either been shut off from or denied access to the new programme or to care from their own personal doctor.
This would appear to be in direct conflict with Article 40.3.1s0] and 2of the Irish Constitution which guarantees in its laws to respect, defend and vindicate the personal rights of the citizens.
Included in these rights of the citizens is the right to privacy. An essential aspect of this is the right of access to and treatment from one's personal physician. Since October 1st, 1998 the EHB has made an arbitrary and unwarranted intrusion into the privacy of the relationship between patient and doctor, which in most cases is the best forum in which to treat and cure a difficult addiction problem. By denying doctors who have had many years' experience of treating drug addiction the right to prescribe Methadone for their patients in the treatment process and also by adopting a heavy-handed and disruptive attitude toward the many addiction patients struggling to hold on to their valuable employment by insisting that they present themselves at clinics every day on pain of being excluded from treatment, the EHB is guilty of a very serious invasion of the privacy of the citizen for which in most cases there is no logical justification.
Ms Cleary's article highlighted the many harmful effects of excluding patients from treatment. In many cases this includes a return to heroin addiction that might not have occurred but for the oppressive action of the EHB. The catastrophic consequences of this in terms of destruction of the personal dignity of addicts and the increase in crime and suicide rates that follow are only too well known to professionals involved in trying to alleviate one of the country's major problems.
The EHB needs to be called to account for what it has done before the effects of the protocol's casualties mount to a level that public opinion will find simply unacceptable. - Yours, etc., John Brady, SJ,
Milltown Park, Dublin 6.