Healing for drug addiction must come from community - Martin

Healing for those afflicted with addiction to drugs or alcohol must come from the community, the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin has said.

Opening a workshop in Dublin entitled Quenching the Thirst: Spirituality and Addiction, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said: “Community must become the pace where broken lives are welcomed back into a place of integration and healing.”

Many young people in particular are drawn into the world of drinking because they are told it will help them to socialise, he said.

“For some, alcohol and drug use sadly open for them a path which is the opposite of socialising - a path of isolation and marginalisation from society and community.”

He said the negative effects of alcohol can be seen and recognised in many ways and statisticians could produce figures about spending on alcohol or the effects on personal and community health.

“We can quantify global financial costs to the economy,” he said. “In this week we have had a report on the disastrous links between binge-drinking and rape. We see every day how binge-drinking leads to anti-social behaviour among young people. Violent crime has drug and alcohol abuse and addiction as a powerful accomplice.”

Dr Martin was addressing the workshop, sponsored by the Irish Bishops' Drugs Initiative, which addressed the pastoral response to substance abuse throughout Ireland.

The initiative aims to help foster a community and pastoral response to the problem of addiction and includes programmes offering information and awareness, education and training, alternative activities and other support for affected individuals and their families.

He said despite the statistics, the real cost of substance abuse is measured in the numbers of young people “who become trapped on a false path which at first sight seems to offer happiness and spirit but which in the long run only leads to a path of destruction from which they may never return”.

“The Church must become the place where broken lives encounter the restoring love of God through the life and witness of the Christian community,” he added.

He said he wanted to encourage young people who are part of the initiative to heed the message of “moderation and simple and healthy lifestyle and to be ready to sustain their friends who fail... and to help them refind the way of hope”.