As with the process of getting RAFT off the ground, the Recovery College has had the same effect on me, the same infectious feeling.

Now for me personally it’s what is on the horizon that excites me – wherever its heading! Who knows? But I’m heading there.

Take Care Troops.

Iain

In connection with a piece of work I’m doing at the moment I’d be really interested to know what Wired In users think about charities partnering with the alcohol industry, whether through sponsorships, partnerships or accepting funding.

It’s a difficult one, I know, and different people feel really differently about it. I have had money in the past from the industry for alcohol projects and really had to consider the issues very carefully.

All suggestions welcome!

MDMA is currently a class A drug but does it deserve it’s classification? How harmful is MDMA? Where does it come from and what are the risks of taking it?

I decided to find out what a clearer picture on MDMA on behalf on my organisation and help staff understand ecstasy a bit more. Unfortunately I got no response from the article I wrote, I emailed it to a couple of publications but I got no response either.

Here it is for your enjoyment anyway, I hope you find it interesting and learn something from it. If anyone has any webspace on a drug awareness/treatment site they would be willing to host the information then please contact me at dylankerr@cardinalhumecentre.org.uk

Any suggestions, comments or even corrections would be welcome too.

I love this stuff. It makes me feel all humble and a part of something special within the wider recovery network. Because remember, it’s not about me nor you, it’s not about them or us. It’s about everybody.

There that`s my thought for the day, bl**dy unbelievable! There’s another couple of words to describe it!

Toodle-oo the Noo!

Now that I had an equal relationship, with a supportive partner, and a lovely new house in a fab area, I felt able to say that I wanted to reduce the methadone dosage, then detox from the benzos that I was on. I’d been stable for around a year, with no drug or alcohol use, and I felt strong enough to try to make some steps forward.

I was taking Nitrazepam for sleep problems and diazepam for anxiety. My GP suggested swapping to one daily dose of diazepam, as the tablets come in smaller increments and are therefore a bit easier to taper from.

Moreover, as they are a long-acting benzodiazepine, they are supposedly easier to come off than the shorter-acting benzos, although they certainly didn’t feel ‘easy’. I started on 40mg/day of diazepam and reduced by 1mg a week.

The detox from benzos was one of the worst things I have ever been through. I was reduced by 1mg a week, until I got to 2mg a day of diazepam, and then the GP stopped the script.

I have since found out that it wasn’t really the best thing for my mind or body to be stopped cold turkey still on 2mg a day.

I had some seizures and terrible headaches, and I couldn’t sleep properly for months. The first time I had a seizure I was out in town and knocked myself out on a wall. I was taken to hospital where they gave me some diazepam, as they were sure that the seizures were from the doctor reducing me too quickly.

I ended up in hospital about nine times with seizures, but was reticent to take more benzos as I didn’t want to go through the withdrawal again. I was worried that I would feel like that forever, but after about eight months it seemed that the worst of the withdrawals was over.

When the seizures were under control with some non-addictive epilepsy medication, I tried to get back to day-to-day life, but I was so nervous of literally anything and everything. I also found it difficult to learn how to deal with anxiety, worry and stress without having benzos to help.

I’m going to start a structured day programme as of Monday. I’m so happy. They have sorted money for child care for me and have had to work hard to bend it so I can go. I’m so grateful. Things are finally looking better for me. I’ve been struggling for so long without the tools to make my life better.

Just because I now don’t use heroin doesn’t mean I’m cured. I’ll let you know how Monday and next week go, but I just want to say if you know you are struggling push for help. Just keep asking.

Bye and I hope everyone is ok.

lv kel xx

If the nearby steel mill was belching out poisonous fumes and polluting our neighbourhoods, crippling children with contaminated water or reducing life expectancy amongst teenagers, an environmental movement would evolve to challenge the owners and make the plant safe.

This has happened on numerous occasions, and now there is the beginning of a similar sort of movement, one which the Prime Minister is savvy enough to recognise and court.

Instead of clipping the wings of a polluting steel mill, however, socially polluting alcohol retailers who privatise their profits but socialise their costs must now be forced by law to accept some responsibility for the level of social destruction wrought by alcohol.

This is but half the story however. If it were simply a question of taxing alcohol and changing sales practices, we could leave the task to an army of faceless Whitehall Mandarins and forget all about it. But it isn’t, and we can’t.

What has led us to this place? We must now earnestly ask ourselves, our families and our neighbours this question. How did we get to a point where, in the words of MP Sarah Wollaston:

“About 13 young people will die this week as a result of alcohol, and about 650 this year. Nearly a quarter of all deaths of young people aged between 15 and 24 are caused by alcohol. That is two every day – far more than are killed by knife crime or cancer….”

Minimum pricing is certainly a step in the right direction, but only a first step, just as any alcoholic must initially stop drinking in order to start getting well, it is but the very beginning of the journey and without understanding the personal pain and sorrow that led to addiction, relapse is highly likely.

We must now examine our culture, one that celebrates alcohol and alcoholism, that cheers on George Best, Keith Moon, Oliver Reed and Paul Gascoigne as irreverent rebels, that interprets the death of Amy Winehouse as the result of ‘tortured genius’ and rewards X Factor drunks and addicts by more publicity to satisfy our prurience.

We must examine the hopelessness that exists in our society from top to bottom, that presents drinking as an alternative to living, and that has raised drunkenness to the level of a virtue. We must also examine the narcissism and ego fuelled self absorption that we have now all been forced to recognise as legitimate behaviour, and which results in immense personal and social harm.

It has long been understood that societies that are fuelled by such things inevitably weaken or implode, so long after the Government’s new pricing rules come into effect, we must, as a matter of absolute necessity, be engaging in a national debate about who we are and why we drink.

I got clean 3 years ago but every 7 months or so I hit a relapse for about a month or two, and then abstain for 7 months again. It’s doing my head in ‘cos my life turns to crap during my relapse and then I need to spend ages putting it back together again, making up with family etc..

I’ve just started attending South East Alternatives in Glasgow for help with relapse prevention and I must say it looks like a really promising organisation. Can’t wait to get my teeth into it

I would like to say think you for all the support I get off you on Wired In and from CRI and RIOT. I’m just so happy. I’ve not got a job yet, but I am not going to rush it. And what will be will be,

The “rattle” that occurred two to three hours after my last cap was horrendous and the world was a very scary place to be in without my secret stash. I used to call it my credit card, as I wouldn’t leave home without it.

After a long stay in treatment I was successful in beating this particular addiction, only to substitute it for others. I wasn’t ready.

After many years of transferring from one drug to another, it was obvious that it was alcohol that I now needed to tackle. I had thought I could handle this, how wrong I was. My next trip to CBU was the final chance for me and I knew I had to do it this time.

I looked forward to returning to CBU as I knew just how well I was looked after there all those years ago. If I could of done all my treatment there I would of done so, because I had admiration to all the staff there who are so committed and caring.

That was over a year ago now and I’m looking forward to helping out there soon. How things change – not just stopping the substances but the whole mindset.

It’s one of Shakespeare’s best known sonnets, many of you will already be well-acquainted with it. I’ve uttered the first half of it many times to myself in the past, adding the odd alliterative expletive!

“When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state.
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate.
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed.
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Yet in these thoughts, myself almost despising,
Hap’ly I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
For, thy sweet love remembered, such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

William Shakespeare – Sonnet #29

At the flat I was crashing in, the window of the room I slept in was on the ground floor, and I was absolutely convinced that there were people spying on me from the garden, and when I went out that there were people following me. I’m not sure who I thought these people were, or what they wanted, just that they wanted to hurt me.

I’d been going like this full-force for a little more than three years. I saw a photo of myself from this period the other day, and I’ve always been quite “rubenesque”, but in this photo I look like I have anorexia, my skin is yellow, and I have sores all round my mouth.

The frightening thing was, that at the time, I thought I looked fine; good, in fact, as for once I was thin rather than fat!

I’m not sure what actually happened one particular day. I know that I had been up for about five days smoking crack and I think I had a fit and was taken to hospital. I can remember being in the A&E dept of the local hospital, ranting on and on to the nurses, about what I couldn’t tell you.

They sent me to the psychiatric wing of the hospital, mostly I think because they didn’t really know what to do with me, and they didn’t want to discharge me in that state. The next day when I was seen by a psychiatrist, he moved me over to the alcohol and drug unit of the hospital.

I was taking so much methadone, some prescribed and some obtained on the black market, that I don’t think they believed how much I was on. The consultant doctor decided on a dose he thought would be therapeutic, and I spent ten days in there coming off the crack and stabilising on a dose of methadone, nitrazepam and diazepam.

I also attended some group meetings and talked with a psychologist, but I was in such a fragile place mentally that everything just went over my head really.

I’d been living with the same guy (Robert) since I was 16, and I was now 32. He was physically abusive, made me feel like crap, like what was even the point of leaving him, as no-one else would want me. Or at least that’s how he made me feel. He used to sit on his arse all day, while I went to work, paid all the bills and bought all our drugs.

A couple of weeks before I went into hospital, I took some money off Robert for drugs, and he had rung my parents and told them I was on drugs! I was beyond furious, as you’d imagine, and worried about what my parents would think.

In reality, my parents finding out turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me, as they’ve been more supportive then I could have ever imagined. They encouraged me that even if I didn’t do anything else, I should not go back to Robert as it was not a healthy relationship.

After I left the rehab unit, I just didn’t go back to him; in fact, I don’t think I even spoke to him again!

Robert has since died – of an overdose, I think. After I left him, he apparently could not support his own drug habit and started burgling people’s houses. He was on trial for aggravated burglary, which he didn’t get sentenced for as the judge thought he was mentally unstable. He died soon after.

His sister ‘facebooked’ me to tell me, and to say that all his family thought it was my fault he was dead. I certainly didn’t introduce him to drugs – in fact, he was already taking heroin when we met – and I wasn’t even living in the same town when he started robbing people, so I don’t feel any guilt about it.

After the hell he put me through for years, I wasn’t glad he was dead, but I wasn’t sad either. My reaction sounds quite bad, but it wasn’t until I had left Robert and started a relationship with someone else that I realised how badly he’d actually treated me.

I didn’t know that relationships could be so good as the one I have, and now I look back on it, I really regret not leaving him years earlier.

When I first got out of the hospital, I still went back to hanging around my old friends and smoked crack for a month or so. I didn’t really have any friends any more who weren’t on drugs, so it was difficult to break away from using.

However, I then met this guy – well I say met, we’d know each other for years, but not romantically – who’d just got out of prison. We started seeing each other, and he made me start to think that there could be more to life than sitting in some grotty flat smoking crack!

When I left the drug unit of the hospital I was being prescribed over 200mg/day of methadone. I talked to the head doctor at the CDT and explained that as I was buying so much methadone on top of what they were prescribing that if he were to prescribe (for example) 75mg/day, that I would be back to square one and continue topping up my dose illicitly.

The doctor was concerned that if he did prescribe the amount I was requesting, that it would still not be ‘enough’, and that in six or so months I would be back to buying methadone illicitly.

I explained to him that I had no desire to continue my current lifestyle, that I wanted to sort myself out, but unless I was prescribed a reasonable dose of methadone I would be stuck in groundhog day.

After about a two hour consultation with the doctor, and after he’d checked the notes from when I’d been in hospital and seen that I had been prescribed over 200mg/day as an inpatient and had shown no signs of over sedation or drowsiness, he agreed the start me on a dose of 220mg/day, with the proviso that if I let myself, or him, down in anyway that things would have to be reconsidered.

I was really grateful that the doctor was able to see that I was not just drug-seeking, and that I genuinely did need a higher than average dose.

Once I was stabilised on the higher dose I found that my cravings for crack diminished, and although I still wanted to use the craving lessened every day. I don’t think that the CDT were really very well-equipped to know how to help me get off crack.

In reality, I just did what I thought would work for me. The service is very much centred around opiate and alcohol addicts, and there wasn’t really a lot of support for poly-drug users, or stimulant users.

Apart from the methadone, the other thing that really helped me stay away from crack was to cut myself off from my circle of “friends”. I say friends, but really they were only people I used drugs with, and the only thing we had in common was drugs.

Once I was titrated and stable on the methadone – I was still using benzos at this point, but prescribed by my GP, and I was taking them as directed – the other main thing that helped me not to buy more methadone on top of my script, or to use other drugs, was that for once I had a supportive partner, Jim.

If I had known how good a relationship could be, I would have left my ex- years ago, but he made me feel so worthless, like no one else would ever want me, and I was scared to be on my own.

I was able to (and still do) talk to Jim about everything, and as he had had addiction issues in his past he really understood where I was coming from.

The fact that my family now knew about my addictions was a blessing in disguise, as I could not have asked for a better support system. I thought they would totally disown me, but they educated themselves about addiction and have been my rock.

I know that methadone is not supposed to be used for crack addiction, but lots of crack and opiate addicts find that if their methadone dose is increased significantly, it can help curb cravings for drugs other than heroin, such as crack.

In my case, I think that without the help of a higher than normal dose of methadone, I just dread to think where I would be now. It’s given me the space to be able to start working again, and to distance myself from the drug lifestyle so I could start to think like a “normal” person.

“I think it is essential that we make the shift from the acute care model, which we know doesn’t work, to a recovery model.”

Why? “Ultimately our goal should be to help people to obtain the best possible life that they can. In a traditional system we are just focused on symptoms…”

How? “The Recovery philosophy is about partnering with, or standing beside, the person who is going through the process, whether that person is a treatment professional or a person who is also in recovery. It is about how you partner with or become a coach or a facilitator…”

What? “In a traditional system that is based on symptomatology and managing symptoms the focus is on a narrow set of interventions that are focused on those particular issues. But when one moves to a recovery orientation, which is about having a life in the community, it opens up a much broader array of services and interventions that we need to bring to bear to help folks…”

[Arthur Evans and Roland Lamb are members of Wired In’s Advisory Board.]