Addicts, particularly heroin addicts, are demeaned in our society. There’s the language we use to describe them. There’s the disdain. There’s ignoring the flow of addicts through cities and towns, stepping over people nodding out and wanting to get far away from someone who looks high or out of it.
There is criminalising addiction. There is the criminalising of the consequences of addiction that causes addicts to commit crimes to feed their habits.
But there is also the denial and underfunding of services to addicts.
There’s the approach that frequently favours punishment over rehabilitation, or shoddy rehabilitation methods over smart ones.
These things stem from ignorance, prejudice, a willingness to “other” those less fortunate than us, and a desire to ignore a crisis that many of us never interact with.
A supervised injecting centre is planned for Dublin city next year. This centre will provide a safe and controlled environment for heroin addicts.
‘Rejection rooms’
In other cities, these centres reduce harm in many ways, from providing clean needles to reducing the potential and actual transmission of blood-borne infections and diseases, to reducing overdoses, and the medical complications that follow overdoses, and indeed the deaths that follow some overdoses.
At a meeting to discuss this pilot project, Dublin City Councillor Mannix Flynn – never one to shy away from hyperbole – said what such a project would be “delivering is death. What these rooms should be known as is rejection rooms. And they are going to kill communities”.
While such inflammatory, emotional language makes for good soundbites, it has no basis in healthcare or drug treatment.
Heroin addiction is an extraordinarily complex problem to solve, and safe injection rooms are just one small aspect of dealing with that problem.
The meeting at which Flynn spoke was attended by the Temple Bar Company, the Licensed Vintners Association, the Restaurant Association of Ireland, and drug and alcohol abuse service Aisling Group International and others.
Many of these interests will be worried about the location of an injection centre and how that could potentially impact their business.
Vested interests
But all Dubliners need to be served and provided for in Dublin; hoteliers, publicans, councillors, and heroin addicts, too.
Vested interests in the city are entitled to have their points of view heard, but providing for heroin addicts needs to be focussed on what is best for the addicts themselves. They are the ones suffering due to inaction.
Prevention is ideal when it comes to heroin addiction. But it’s an incredibly difficult, multifaceted and complicated process, but nevertheless one that should be pursued.
Treatment is also incredibly important, yet there are more than 20,000 heroin addicts in Ireland and just a few dozen detox beds. The political will is not there to provide for these vulnerable people in our society.
We need to help heroin addicts. We need to care for addicts in the same way we aspire to care for all citizens.
If anything delivers death to heroin addicts, it is the Irish State’s refusal to tackle a culture of heroin addiction that has permeated the country, and particularly lower-income areas of Dublin, for the best part of 40 years.
Injecting centres allow heroin addicts to engage in safer behaviour, a behaviour they will engage with anyway – but without injecting centres, in a more dangerous manner.
Dying on our streets
Opposing injection centres while simultaneously decrying the actions of and interactions with drug users on our streets makes no sense.
There are addicts overdosing and dying on our streets. There are discarded needles down alleyways. There are people shooting up in laneways and in doorways. None of this is safe.
Supervised injection centres may also offer addicts the opportunity to interact with people who provide services that might get them off heroin.
What would people honestly prefer in their backyard?
A centre where addicts are supervised and cared for, or the status quo, where high risk-taking in injecting is commonplace, and the mundanity and tragedy and hopelessness of heroin addiction is compounded?
Our approach to tackling heroin addiction has been at a standstill.
The mass use of methadone, as a replacement drug, has also confined people to a lifetime of a different kind of addiction, perhaps more manageable, but often just as inescapable.
What we have been doing hasn’t been working. We need different approaches.
We need to try different things and measure their outcomes and successes and failings and decide where to go from there.
One’s future, one’s quality of life, one’s ability to fulfil one’s potential should not be tossed away because of addiction.
Heroin addiction can often feel inescapable. Even if some of those addicts availing of an injection centre will never escape their addiction, at least we can treat addicts with dignity, providing the safety and comfort that any one of us deserves.
I understand that innovations in drug policy can provoke suspicion or fear, but we have to try whatever has a chance of working.