Welcome

Welcome to my new blog space,I hope that over the course of the coming months I will get a chance to post at least every couple of weeks and we get the chance to explore why the Heroin crisis in this country is an issue intrinsically linked with themes of social justice and equality. We will touch on idea's and themes which form the corner stone of equality, such as class, ability, disadvantage, gender, race and education. The aim in this is to develop a clear picture of how it is our systems produces in-equality and subsequently how this in-equality creates breeding grounds for hard drug use. 


I have posted this blog in the hope of reaching out to people who have a real interest in the drug problem and related issues in this country. In particular I have circulated it to professionals and volunteers who are linked with service provision, education and social care. Given the current drive for austerity, as we witness the dismantling of the community sector and in my opinion the impending failure of social partnership, I hope to provide a space that might stimulate thought about the wider issue of drugs. In the near future it may not be that we simply have to think about new ways to tackle drugs, but we may well have to find them, after all if things continue as they are how long will it take for the money to run out altogether?   


The aim really is to take a look at the Heroin crisis from a macro point of view, to step back from the individual tragedy of Heroin addiction and look at the problem at a broader societal level. It seems vital at this stage to clarify that I distinguish between the Heroin crisis and other drugs, based on the epidemiological dispersion of Heroin abuse in this country. Heroin was and is a drug of the poor, disadvantaged and socially excluded communities of our fair land. Its devastating impact has ravaged working class communities since the late seventies and despite the fact that research paper after research paper has identified the links between Heroin abuse and social exclusion twenty five years later it seems that we remain convinced if we can just treat enough addicts and not the social disease producing them, the problem will become a manageable one. In the words of Dr J Bradshaw, the first person to really investigate the Heroin problem in any meaningful way, "Multiple causes have been at work to produce the present epidemic of drug abuse, and it may be that one of them is a profound sickness in society. If so, the abuse may not abate until the sickness does."(J.Bradahaw, 1982)


After thirty odd years of band aid style interventions largely focused on treating the addicts, perhaps it is time to look and see if Heroin may be a symptom of poverty, poverty that has been institutionalized by our neo-liberal economic policy which is driven by an engine of corruption and greed. If we hope to tackle these broader societal questions, by necessity we will need to examine a range of subjects that are intrinsically linked to themes of equality and social justice.

Drug Of The Poor

As things stand our Government would have you believe in documents like the national drug strategy that the problem of heroin addiction is primarily a medical one and that it should be treated on an individual basis. Whilst I do not deny that addiction is a complex problem, with definite medical implications there is one glaringly obvious fact that successive governments have chosen to ignore, the  fact that heroin is not evenly dispersed in our communities.


If for instance over the last thirty years large proportions of the young people in one of our more affluent neighbourhoods had developed life threatening medical conditions, then it is reasonable to assume that our government would have investigated what it is in these neighbourhoods that was a contributing factor. That seems only sensible really, not a science fiction type analogy, quite simplistic. 


Why then is it that sucessive governments whom have identified heroin addiction as a medical problem have not gone to the neighbourhoods that are producing disproportionate amounts of heroin addicts to investigate. Why is it that they continuously fail to recognize this very simple and glaringly obvious fact, heroin is not even distributed in our country, it ravages very distinct communities and yet our government continues to address the problem on an individual basis. 


Why has very little time or money been put into finding out what it is about these communities that makes their young people suseptible to the charms of opiate abuse. Is it that really looking at this aspect of heroin in Ireland would open a can of worms, would it mean that we as a nation would have to face up to some stark facts about how we live, how we re-distributed wealth, facts about our education system, our social welfare system, facts about how we as a so called catholic country live in one of the most un-equal societies in the modern world and facts about how greed and neo-liberalism have widened this gap even further. 


If you want a window into the future then cast your eye across the atlantic to our neo-liberal cousins in America, a country where drugs have ravaged whole working class and ethnic communities. A country where in certain cities whole area's have been cut adrift and allowed to degenerate. Do not be fooled drugs have not and will not go away, they continue to change and develop and until we begin to address some of the fundamental questions of equality that define the neighborhoods in which they flourish, then things will continue to get worse.