OUR HIT AND MISS APPROACH TO ADDICTION

WE are about to embark on yet another great social experiment and turn the
local suburban chemist into a methadone clinic.

Inspirational.

Anyone who has ever watched the comings and going at a methadone clinic,
seen the pathetically addicted people walking into and out of them, knows
that all methadone is doing is keeping a group of people permanently
anaethetised and addicted to an equally nasty substitute for heroin rather
than getting them unaddicted and healthy.

Its not a pretty sight.

And we're paying for it.

After the historic Drug Summit last year the State Government accepted a
recommendation to increase the number or pharmacies (and decrease the
clinics) distributing methadone by 60 per cent to 500 chemist shops. Put
simply, that's one in three across NSW. Put more crudely, right in your
backyard, right under your nose. Easier access to drugs. How? With a cash
jackpot of $5.5 million dollars for training and payments to chemists. Why?
To keep people off heroin. (Right!) And reduce the "honeypot" effect of the
big clinics where lots of undesirables gather. Doubly great -- spread the
undesireables around.

Last year, when the Government officially announced plans to spread the
methadone program throughout the suburbs. Health Minister Craig Knowles
said the responsibility for the drug problem must be shared.

Well, thank you very much Mr Knowles for telling me what I have to be
responsible for. Frankly, it's not a problem I want to share at my local
suburban pharmacy. Call it tough love, but I'm not responsible for someone
else's addiction.

I don't want to be standing next to an addict as he or she knocks back a
plastic cup of methadone syrup while I'm waiting to buy my double pack of
Berocca or cold tablets.

That's not an environment I want to conduct business in. The Pharmacy
Guild' s NSW branch director Ian Campbell says pharmacists already treat
3500 patients a year and haven't had problems, no crime or stealing, and
doesn't expect any under the extended program. Right now in NSW, 13,000
people are on methadone, most at clinics which charge the patient, and many
have been for years.

The thing about methadone is that it doesn't get people off drugs. I would
have thought that was the ultimate goal of any taxpayer funded program.
That 's what I want my tax dollars doing.

The Salvation Army's addictions consultant Brian Watters says that a
minority of addicts manage to have a more stable life with methadone, but
most don't. While Watters warns against stereotyping all methadone users as
scruffy criminal types, he equally warns against believing they all use
nothing other than legally provided, taxpayer funded narcotic.

They don't. Many use illegal drugs and people have overdosed on methadone.
Because it's legal doesn't make it safe. It's the harm minimisation
approach, not a zero harm approach.

Currently, a daily dose of the drug (taken orally) is provided for free to
public clinics by the Federal Government and costs the average pharmacist
who administers it about $25 per week per patient.

The pharmacists and clinics charge the patient, on average, around $30
week, says one chemist. It costs the taxpayers about $50 million a year
according to a report which quoted the National Drug and Alcohol Research
Centre.

Under the new brainwave, the Carr government will treat 23,450 people over
the next four years.

Here's how. A person on a program is assessed for suitability by a GP. Then
they go on a stabilisation program where they are initially administered
smaller doses for a few weeks while being weaned off -- hopefully --
heroin. Then the dose goes up to substitute the narcotic effects of heroin.

"The reality is they stay on it for a long time because the opiod receptors
are so enhanced that to go off it means withdrawal," says the pharmacist.

So. Bottom line? Easier to get. Still addicted. Just like heroin. A
straight swap. And in your local chemists shop.

What's so great about that?