IT HAD been established in the US that for ever dollar spent on drug treatment services, seven dollars were saved by the community, the director of the addiction resource centre in London said. Dr Michael Farrell also said that American studies had shown "dramatic falls" in the perpetration of crime by those in treatment.
However, it had also been established in one survey that nearly half of those undergoing treatment for heroin abuse dropped out after six months and their crime levels were soon back to previous levels. It had also been found that of those using needles for more than five years, 90 per cent were hepatitis C positive.
The governor of Mountjoy prison, Mr John Lonergan, told a conference workshop that "over 80 per cent" of prisoners there "have at some stage in their lives experienced or experimented with illegal drugs, with up to 65 per cent using heroin, 55 per cent intravenously".
Preventing the flow of drugs into the prison was impossible as the drugs themselves were "so tiny
Addicts arrived in the prison in a horrific physical and mental condition. They are stones underweight, particularly the women, who are probably the most disadvantaged of all." He spoke of the Prison Service's inability to help such people.
"The prisoner is serving a prison sentence for a violent crime, while the public expectation is that he/ she is in prison for drug treatment," he said. They were "poor, disadvantaged, inadequate people", who had been "dumped into prison".
It had always been like that, he said. There were major behavioural problems with some who were serving long sentences and whose motivation (to get off drugs) was therefore "nil".
Most of the prisoners/addicts were from the same "five or six" postal districts in Dublin. "Society doesn't show any great concern for these areas," he said. It had " vested interest in keeping the disadvantaged where they are".
Mr Lonergan said he was not making excuses for the prisoners, just explaining the situation. They were "ostracised". They had no interest in "a general election or the value of the pound". They "may have robbed millions, but 99.99 per cent are destitute".
Attitudes had to change, he said, with partnership programmes becoming more inclusive. It should not have happened, for instance, that parents resisted attempts by the Minister for Education, MS Breathnach, when she tried to divert teachers from schools with a low pupil teacher ratio to disadvantaged areas. But it did.