Change your Environment Without Leaving Your Home

By David Schneider

The last few weeks have been interesting for me. I have been doing field placement in a drug & alcohol detox unit. I also know someone socially who has been dipping into the old drug use rather heavily in recent times. It has all been quite interesting, to say the least, particularly since it seems that though we live on the same planet, most heavy drug users actually live in a very different world. A pertinent example of this is a client I had who was detoxing from heroin use. This nice person sat in their room complaining of withdrawal symptoms for a while, then snuck out and into an adjacent building, stole a VCR & stashed it, then snuck back into their room and pretended that they'd never left. Unfortunately for this individual, a member of the nursing staff witnessed this little adventure, and confronted the woman in question. Her response? "I'm a heroin addict, what else would I do?"

Now if I stole a VCR, I would be arrested and charged, and in all likelihood convicted in due course. Her repercussions? She had to complete her detox and then leave the facility, reinforcement of poor behaviour? Perhaps. What I think amazes me the most, was that several thousand dollars worth of effort went into helping this person, her detox didn't cost her a cent, nor her food nor lodgings, and the way she repaid the people who were trying to help her was to try and steal stuff, so that she could go out and get a fix after her detox. This is, to me at least, amazing. It is a completely different mentality to what we generally refer to as "normal".

Now my friend isn't a heroin user, she's just stoned all the time. Except when she's banging speed (injecting it), or dropping acid (placing an LSD soaked piece of cardboard under your tongue), or dropping an E (swallowing an Ecstasy tablet), or experimenting with some other form of new drug, generally in conjunction with other drugs.

These two individuals, ranging from the hard-core drug user, to the regular user of the "softer" drugs, have certain similarities. Both have a distorted worldview. Almost all of their friends are drugs users, and they spend a lot of their time discussing drug use. The heroin addict has performed various sexual services to support her drug use. My friend worked in a peep-a-view, a strip tease place where women insert vibrators into their vibrators into their vaginas, and in many instances, anus, for the titillation of their clients. Both have resorted to larceny at various times to support their drug taking behaviour. Both see police intervention in their activities as some sort of persecution rather than as the consequences of their actions. In fact after a little while the lines of distinction between the two get kind of blurry.

One thing I learned pretty darned quickly, was that the majority of addicted people, be they addicted to a form of drug, or alcohol, is an apparent inability to accept responsibility for their own lives and the course that it has taken. In some cases this is because their emotional age is at whatever age they started their substance abuse. If your response to every crisis is to get bombed, you just don't learn to have adult coping skills. In other circumstances it just seems to be denial, that there is any fault with them or their behaviour. At the detox centre we had one gentleman who had spent all of his money on alcohol before coming into the unit. He then caused a great ruckus because he didn't have any cigarettes. The reason that he didn't have any cigarettes was because Centrelink wouldn't give him a third advance in a row, that other clients didn't want to share their stockpiles, that staff wouldn't loan him money, and so on and so forth. At no point would he accept that if he had budgeted for cigarettes and not blown all of his payment on alcohol, that he would have had some cigarettes.

I'm not trying to make addicted people seem like evil monsters without conscience, but rather express the alarm I feel at the situation that these people have placed themselves in, or have been placed in. Many have, in addition to retarded emotional growth, actually damaged themselves (ie: their brain) to the point where they are unable to acquire new skills and knowledge. I have seen, and continue to see, people who spend all their time bombed out of their skull. People for who every day is pretty much the same as every other day. Whose planning seldom extends past the acquisition of their next batch of drugs. Who have a worldview so distorted as to make it problematic at best for them to integrate properly into society. Who have lost the capacity to grow and to learn and to change.

And it scares the hell out of me.

I don't know what the answer is, though I do know that Mr Howard's "Zero Tolerance on Drugs" is a load of bollocks, and just turfing drug users into prison at every opportunity is no sort of useful response. I can't help wondering how many of these damaged people wouldn't be leading the lives that they are, if they'd been able to get proper treatment for the things that happened to them as a child. I can't help but wonder if people had had access to proper mental health care, instead of just being turfed into the streets, how many of them might have been saved from suffering. I can't help but wonder what might have happened if the issue of illicit drug use hadn't been used as some sort of vote scoring football by politicians. I can't help but wonder how many lives wouldn't have been shattered, destroyed and prematurely ended.

And it still scares the hell out of me.

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