Hi, Its Monday, a new work and there is alot happening. Im please to confirm that on Wednesday I will be going on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire for 45mins/1 hour to be interviewed about all things recovery.
I have had a nice weekend, Friday marked 35 weeks sober and then on Saturday I went to Birmingham for the night to stop at my brothers and babysit my young nieces and nephew and had a blast, I truly am blessed with a great family.
When I got home on Sunday I did some more research on the war of drugs and have found the following thought bits. The war on drugs itself creates a culture of terror! If I went to a shop now and tried to rob alcohol from them they would call the police who would arrest me, the law is on the shops side. If you went to rob your local cannabis or crack dealer he couldn't call the police because they would arrest him. Therefore Mr.Dealer has 2 options he either fights back but who wants to fight on a daily basis? so what he does instead is use extreme violence and become truly terrifying to put the message out on the streets that he is not to be reckoned with.
One thing I also thought about and want to relay to all you readers is that the myth of the chemicals in drugs like heroin is just that, a myth. The theory goes along the line of if you took heroin for 20 days or so then it would have you, you would be addicted. This is wrong. If I went into hospital now to have a major operation done I would be given Diamorphine, which is medically pure Heroin. I would be given it for quite a long period of time, but would I leave the hospital a junkie, no!. This is because of the 'Rat Park' theory. The test that first saw a rat in a cage, just a plain small cage with 2 water bottles. The first one had just normal water and the second one had water laced with a drug. Almost every time the rat picked the drugged water until eventual overdose and death. A guy called Bruce Alexander conducted the same test but with a different cage called 'Rat Park' basically a heaven for rats, nice food, sex, friends, lots of space and fun activities everything a rat could ever wish for. In the results for this test the rats barley or never used the drugged water. This shows that addiction is more about the cage/environment we are in rather then it being a disease. At around the same time as the 'Rat Park' experiment there was a human experiment going on called the 'Vietnam War'. It was alleged that up to 15% of US service men were addicted to Heroin whilst out in Vietnam fighting the war. At the time America became increasingly worried that after they war and the troops came home the streets would be full of junkies. This didn't happen, the troops came home and hugely never used again. For me this shows that being stuck out at war, in a jungle fearing for there lives they resorted to drug use, then once they returned home to there lovely families and homes etc they felt no need for the drugs.
Bud Osborn. In the year 2000 the Downtown, East side of Vancouver had the highest concentration of addicts in North America, Massive overdose death toll. Bud was a homeless street addict from Iowa and bud was watching all his friends die around him, alot of them were shooting up behind dumpsters so cops wouldn't see them, and of course because cops couldn't see them no body else could either and they would be found like a day later dead from overdoses. Bud is watching all his friends die and thinks 'I gotta do something about this, but im just a homeless junkie what can I do?'. What Bud does is comes up with a simple idea, he gets aload of the addicts together and says "why don't we start patrolling the allies in the periods we are not using, just us, just the addicts to patrol for people OD'ing and as soon as we see someone OD'ing we will call the ambulance". They start to do it and after just 6 months the death from overdose rate really dramatically falls. After that the addicts start to think, maybe we aren't the pieces of shit everyone thought we were, maybe we could do something make a change. Eventually they get to extending the patrolling to deal with further issues upsetting people, such as cleaning up needles off the ground after use etc. Bud then learnt in a local library about Frankfurt where they had setup a safe injecting room, with clean needles and medical assistance etc which had massively brought there local death toll down, but is something that had never happened in North America since the start of the drug war. At the time the mayor of Vancouver was called Phillip Owen and his attitude was that addicts should be taken to a local military base and detained. Bud and his friends stalked and campaigned to Phillip for years to open this safe injecting room with no breakthrough, until eventually Phillip decides to go incognito into the downtown eastside to see what the deal is. Phillip spends a week just talking to people and to his credit he listens to them and his blown away and says 'I never knew these peoples lives were like this'. Some short time afterwards he holds a press conference with the chief of the police, the coroner and one of the addicts and he says "From now on when ever I talk about addiction Im going to have one of the addicts with me on the platform and we are going to open the first injecting room in North America and we're going to have the most compassionate drug policies in North America and things are going to chance you wait and see". In effect it ends his career, his party deselect him. After 10 years the results are in, Average life expectancy has improved by 10 years and the overdose rate is down by 80%. To this day Phillip Owen maintains that he would sacrifice his whole career to do it all again. If you picture Bud, a homeless street addict in effect powerless, he started an uprising that changed his entire city. This is proof that we are so much more powerful then we know.
Portugal. 10 years ago Portugal had one of the worse drug problems in Europe, 1% of the population was addicted to heroin, thats alot. Every year they tried cracking down harder and every year the problem got worse. They tried the American way and it kept getting worse and worse. Eventually the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition setup a panel of doctors, judges etc and told them to figure out what to do and give them the answer to sort this problem out. After a year plus of research the panel comes back and says "lets decimalise everything from Cannabis to Crack, but lets spend all the money we used arresting, trying and imprisoning drug users and spend it on really good drug treatment". This is not drug treatment as we think of it traditionally but instead treatment that takes on the lessons of Rat Park. All of Portugal's drug treatment is about reconnecting drug addicts with society. Partly there program is about rehab and physiological support, but the crucial part is about getting them jobs. They adopted the attitude of wanting every addict in Portugal to wake up in the morning with something to do and meaning in there lives. The biggest thing they did was subsidised jobs, say someone use to be a mechanic but then became an addict, they would go to a garage and say "we will pay half this guys wages for a year if you give him a job". Also they setup up micro-loans for addicts who wanted to setup there own businesses.
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