Letters To The Editor

August 2000

How interesting that the articles about methadone appeared following your wonderful, positive editorial about blame. I'm sorry but methadone is the victim here and the facts do not support the letters published in the June heroInsight. Methadone does not have side effects which preclude working. The whole point of being on methadone is to enable people to work. Methadone does not rot your teeth from sugar. It has an anticholinergic effect the same as anaesthetics and cannabis which give you a dry mouth. The preventative care is cleaning the teeth, drinking water or using chewing gum.

How many people on methadone acknowledge that it is their cannabis use and poor dental hygiene that is the major cause of tooth decay? Most people who have used heroin to the extent they are on methadone have had a period of neglecting cleaning their teeth but only notice the decay later. The glucose was removed from methadone because people were foolishly injecting it and causing abscesses. As methadone is passed from the oral route to the liver to metabolise far better than by injection, this is another myth that diverters of methadone do not acknowledge and continue to inject because they have a fixation with the injecting process.

Methadone does not cause endocarditis. That is the result of introducing a germ into the blood either by not cleaning the skin prior to an injection or because of the flu (as in the movie Beaches). Methadone does not cause psychosis but smoking cannabis has a high correlation with people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia.

There has been reams of research into the safety of methadone and there is no evidence to this time that it is not the safest and best treatment for heroin dependence by reducing deaths, crime and disease associated with injecting. Unfortunately, methadone is the victim of blame. There are problems with the delivery of treatment and that is what FDS as a lobby group is for.

Bring that information to the Health Department's attention. The Methadone Advice and Complaints Service (MACS-NSW 1800 642 428) is a sister unit to ADIS. They will pass on any complaints about poor treatment management and lack of professionalism. If the organisation wants to continue with the development of the wonderful partnerships with people who work in the field it now has, printing misinformation is not the way to maintain respect.

Jennifer Rosewood, RN RPN

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Hello. My name is Rebecca Bellenger and I was one of the Macquarie University students that listened to you tonight [Friday 26 May 2000]. I am writing for a few reasons. Firstly, to say that I was absolutely amazed by the way you spoke and to commend you on your courage and confidence to talk so openly about events that are so personal to you in front of strangers. Thank you for sharing your experience with us.

Before tonight I must admit that I barely knew anything about the heroin situation in the world, let alone NSW. You have definitely made an impact on my views (which were pretty much non-existent prior to this) towards this area. I was stunned by the facts you brought forward to us and am shocked by how naive or sheltered I have been. It has made me think quite a lot about the situation since I left the lecture and was wondering if you would mind answering a few questions if you have the time.

My first one is that you spoke about the three factors that contribute to heroin deaths (ie tolerance factor, isolation and other drugs), but I was wondering what exactly heroin did to Damien's body itself. Did the combination of the alcohol and heroin cause a heart attack, etc.?

My second question is about the injecting rooms. What is the current situation with that? I remember hearing about it all quite a few months ago but it has since died down. And also, how do you try and convince people (on a small scale) that injecting rooms are a good idea? I was talking to my father tonight about it all and he was saying that he has had heart disease for 16 years and does not get any medications free, so why should addicts who put themselves in that situation? He also reckons that setting things up like that would encourage the use of heroin. I totally disagree with this. I look at the Dutch and how cannabis is available in cafe's over there and their statistics for hash use is very small compared to Australia. I suppose I was not very strong in my argument about what a good idea the rooms are, and pretty much gave up trying to convince him, or even slightly sway him over to consider the idea. I know my dad is not the only one with this kind of view and it is hard to point out my view (which since tonight is quite strong) on the injecting rooms.

My third question I am not exactly sure if you will be able to answer. I am currently studying psychology, but since I have taken on Anthropology: Drugs Across Cultures, I have developed a great interest in this area. Mainly wanting to help addicts and their families─to actually see how it affects people, and how the help provided can improve lives. My question is: How do I go about getting involved in something like this?

I thank you once again for your talk tonight. I thought I would let you know that it opened my eyes so much to the world and has helped me understand a lot more about heroin and how it affects people's lives─the addicts themselves, and their families. It made me come away wishing I had the answer to the problem and that I could help make a difference. I am very sorry about your son's death. Your story touched me and I can honestly say that the work you are doing has definitely made Damien's life and death something worthwhile and very special.

Thank you also for taking the time to read this e-mail and I look forward to hearing from you.

Rebecca Bellenger

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Dear Friends,

Thanks for your quick response to my recent phone call, which resulted in you sending me copies of your heroInsight for March 2000 and April/May 2000. I knew from the moment I began reading the first article in the March issue, `Look Between The Lines' that I had definitely done the right thing in contacting you.

I've not been personally affected by the problems of illicit drugs in our society, but when I returned to Australia in 1993, after spending the better part of seven years involved in voluntary refugee aid work in the Cambodian camps in Thailand, I was soon shocked by what I could see happening in the Western suburbs of Melbourne in relation to drug-taking and selling. Also, I lived for a year or so with old friends whose son I had seen grow from the baby stage─through teenage years to then be in his late twenties, and I saw what his addiction to cannabis had done to his once almost passionate desire to be a good motor mechanic. (At the stage of my return to Australia he had been on the dole or in TAFE training courses for years, heavily into smoking and distributing dope to his circle of friends who came at all hours of the day or night for smoking and music sessions in his backyard bungalow.) However, I eventually came to realise that many of his `customers' and groupie smokers were people whom I knew to be basically `good' citizens, some employed in responsible jobs, so that began to change my previous strictly held prohibitionist beliefs.

During the past six years or so I've attended many community meetings (where I actually listened to recovering addicts and youth workers, and for the first time heard the news that people did drugs because they really did `enjoy' them). I then became a fairly active letters-to-the-editor campaigner and submitted proposals/concept papers to various inquiries, fully committed to harm minimisation, more education, more detox/rehab, youth drug courts, diversion programs, more activities for young people to put them back in touch with some of the more simple joys of living, etc. etc. You know better than I the full range of things we need to be doing. The current struggle to get supervised injecting facilities as an urgently needed first-aid type move, then to get recalcitrant politicians to further embrace non-prohibitionist policies are now my most time-consuming `humanist' activities.

As my advancing years are starting to slow me down a little, and as I ease off on other campaigns linked to my S.E. Asian experiences and involvements, I feel a need to become more `active' in the `human' side of the fight to save people from themselves, especially from the scourge of drug addiction. So far I haven't quite had the courage to get more actively involved, being a little nervous about my ability to handle that so-different type of pressure. But there is still a chance I will make the commitment as possibly my last `big' project in life. Hence, my effort to contact your group to see what I can learn from your journals, articles, etc. before deciding at what level and to what degree I make a commitment.

Please find my enclosed subscription/ application for membership of your group, and I look forward to further newsletters. Thanks again for your prompt reply to my phone call.

Brian J. Hurlock

PS: If I could make time I would like to address some observations I made while reading the `School Education and Drugs' article in your March 2000 newsletter. It confirms something I had warned about six years ago─that education on illicit drugs should NOT be simply part of some education curriculum, nor should we expect much progress if the school staff are responsible for doing the teaching. I knew even then that was the wrong approach and it would be largely counter-productive. It is a similar situation to mothers and fathers telling their kids they shouldn't smoke or drink. Education professionals are being too protective of their own turf, and too `precious'. We are not being fair dinkum in those education endeavours, and we will continue to waste huge amounts of public money until we get specialist groups going around the schools in a comprehensive, continuing and repeat-visit type of program, made up of a young, articulate recovered/recovering addict, plus a hero of the young people such as a sporting hero, plus a youth/drug welfare worker (from a street base NGO not a self-serving government bureaucrat) plus (maybe) someone representing the legal/law side of the issue (although I must recognise that some young people are not comfortable with that one, even when I suggest they could be members who are in favour of harm minimisation), and (maybe) a youngish person who has been successful in life because she or he was able to resist the temptation which destroyed some of his/her peers. At least that type of thing. A key to successful communication and acceptance by the young people will be minimum contact/supervision by the school's teachers during the early session─more direct and informal communication between the specialist group and the students (later follow-up sessions with teachers and parent groups, etc.). But I know in every fibre of my body that there are aspects of what I read of the current education program which are already doomed to fail, and in fact, will be largely counterproductive BECAUSE it is being handed to the teachers to implement. They might as well throw their money into a furnace.

I recently saw on TV where, down here in Victoria, Les Twentyman and his `Open Family' people have started a good project which begins with a short film/ad showing a young girl who is an addict, what it has done to her life, her attempts to detox etc., and the repeated attempts by the `Open Family' group to stand by her (but concentrating on the pain and suffering for all concerned). It's not exactly what I envisaged as being ideal but it would be seen by the faces and reactions of the students that Les was getting across to them in a way that none of the few teaching staff in attendance were getting across. I also know that Les tried to get just a little funding from the Kennett government a few years ago, to take a little team (similar to that which I outlined) around the schools in the western suburbs. Les had the full backing of the then Footscray Football Club and a couple of champions of the past from other clubs. But Kennett knocked that back even though the funding request was relatively small and there was already a community fund against which the government could have drawn. At that stage I knew that Kennett was not being `fair dinkum' in his so-called new initiatives to help the victims (something he popped up with just before the last election he was to win, and then he failed to come good with the reforms he had promised).

Now I only go into all that detail to indicate the concept I outlined is not just the imaginings of an isolated typical `do-gooder'. Others, like Les Twentyman, are way ahead of the politicians, the professional `─sts', and more importantly, way ahead of the education bureaucrats, principals and teachers who are so protective of their own `empires', and won't give experienced field workers and volunteers a chance to prove how effective their practical ideas will be. In between time, young people die unnecessarily and I hear again and again from their peer group members that they aren't really being told the whole frightening facts about the dangers of illicit drug use.

Brian Hurlock