There is reason for those people in the Eastern Health Board area who have been trying to provide services to combat the effects of drug abuse to feel a justifiable sense of achievement. The report published last week (an external assessment by the National Addiction Centre of the London-based Institute of Psychiatry) offers a positive view of the work they have been doing. But the service-providers, who have participated in a commendably massive increase in the services provided over the past five years, must also be aware from the report of the gargantuan task that remains to be accomplished.
The report notes, in what must be one of the more modest understatements ever made, that "drug misuse is a complex psychosocial problem which requires a multi-faceted response". Yet it is able to affirm that, merely by providing services for people who abuse drugs already, some drug centres in the Eastern Health Board (EHB) area have been able to record a return to work of 40 per cent of those who have been provided with treatment and rehabilitation. This figure is high in the league of international comparisons. The centres are also reporting reductions of crime levels of between 60 per cent and 80 per cent in their catchment areas - a point which might be taken into consideration by those residents' groups which have resisted the establishment of drug treatment centres in their neighbourhoods.
But with a guesstimate of 13,000 heroin addicts in Dublin, it must be noted that not all the proposed centres have been established (often as a result of local resistance) and that last October there were 4,000 individuals in treatment in the EHB area, many of them brought in as a result of the provision of methadone, a substance which provides relief and control but is itself as addictive as heroin, even if a great deal less damaging to health. As complimentary as Dr Michael Farrell and his colleagues from the National Addiction Centre in London are to the EHB's co-ordinated and multi-disciplinary services, it must be apparent that even these services are not, of themselves, capable of eliminating the problems of drug abuse.
They are, of course, an essential element in any local or national strategy designed to deal effectively with the drugs problem, and it is good to hear assessors from outside the jurisdiction declare that, as far as they go, they are more effective than many others elsewhere. Clearly, they must be continued and expanded. But to get this State to the point where it can say with any confidence that the drugs problem, which has grown steadily over the past three decades, is behind us a much more radical programme of psychosocial intervention will be required, combined with more effective law-enforcement on a global scale than exists at present. Someone needs to discover more about the root causes of social alienation here, about the protection of social coherence in such matters as town planning and shifting population patterns, about basic education in social skills and personal relationships, and about a great deal more besides.