Yesterday's announcement of an Eastern HealthBoard programme to tackle drug abuse is many years overdue but this should not detract from its significance. The task is daunting most people will accept that the city has 8,000 heroin addicts Tony Gregaory TD has alleged that the true figure is at least 16,000. The significance of the announcement is that the EHB is acknowledging that a great deal needs to be done and it is beginning a major programme of work. The number of detoxification beds is to be increased, a short stay unit will be opened, an extra 300 heroin smokers the syringe users of the near future will be treated. The number of local addiction centres will be trebled to 12. A variety of other measures is also included in the £14 million programme.
These measures have been criticised on the grounds that they seem to rely too much on the use of the heroin replacement drug, methadone. There is a great deal more to breaking heroin addiction than its replacement by another drug. The addict who gives up heroin is faced with the loss of the company of other addicts and with the loss of a daily purpose, namely getting money for drugs and then getting drugs.
Heroin addicts must also cope with the losses which flow from the drug addiction loss of family, perhaps loss of children, upcoming court proceedings with a threatened loss of freedom these are not easy to face.
This is why groups such as the Merchant's Quay Project place an emphasis on providing a range of training courses for people who have given up heroin and why Community Response, which works with drug abusers and their families in the south inner city, warned that the EHB plan would fail without a greater emphasis on after care and rehabilitation.
An example of the value of taking these views seriously emerged in another report published yesterday on security problems facing Temple Street Children's Hospital. There, the work of the Hardwicke Street Residents' Committee has dramatically reduced crime problems in the area. As the report from Temple Street pointed out, the children of the area desperately need sports and recreational facilities. When he was Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, the Rev Victor Griffin endlessly pressed for sports and recreational facilities for young people in the south inner city. Had he been listened to, fewer children might today face death or desolation from hepatitis or AIDS, the two dreadful companions of heroin. To its credit, the Eastern Health Board appointed a manager, Mr Pat McLoughlin, for its drugs and AIDS services within the past year.
His main allies in this work must be the community groups which struggle to find the money to expand their services. Mr McLoughlin can multiply the effect of his programme many times over by funding these groups generously. He has already shown that he can work in a positive way with such groups. His intervention in the recent controversy over proposals now abandoned to move psychiatric patients out of their home in Cork Street and replace them with a drugs service is evidence of this. Now the patients remain in their home and the local community has agreed on a service to be provided for drug abusers across the road. There are not many communities which have agreed to the provision of such services in their midst but it has been done in Cork Street and, indeed, in Amiens Street on the north side. It is in working with communities and community groups that the Eastern Health Board will achieve its greatest effect.