I search ‘drug rehabilitation’, there are hundreds that
flash up; beautiful buildings, clinical rooms, promises of a life lived like a
hotel. Hidden price tags. I try again- ‘free rehab,’ up pops adverts like package
holidays on a website- ‘At home detox, only £1295’, ‘7 day residential detox
£2500’, LATEST OFFERS screaming from the screen like Tomas Cook’s Tenerife get
away. Pay for your pain because you are the pain in society, that’s what I
hear. It’s what I see in the streets, clay faces, glazed eyes, ignored. Prisons
full of the aches and no escape. Almost as if our answer is in our bank balance,
blind the side lines and tunnel vision to debt and empty pockets.
I called up Bristol Wellbeing when I was low, lower than
low, needed to talk to someone again. Half an hour of questions and heart and
soul pouring, rated the highest on the depression “scale”. A call back months
later to tell me they couldn’t help me because I am a drug addict. Because I
have a disease that separates me from the rest of humanity. But this story is
small, mine is small and I am lucky. I talk to recovery friends, they talk of
waiting lists and bedsits and mould and mattresses on floors, park benches,
fear. Hospital beds that kick from underneath them when the shaking is dulled
and slowed by medication.
I understand that it’s our responsibility to get clean.
Recovery is a choice, but how can you choose when no one is giving you the
option? The utter bleakness of this illness is reflected in the way it’s
treated. The best treatment to seems to be the hardest to find, almost a
secret. It feels like our freedom is sold to us. Our lives are sold back to us.
I praise the NHS, love the NHS but drug rehabilitation isn’t really provided by
them at all. Just detox after detox. The irony of doctors pumping more drugs
into our systems to get us clean, detoxing our bodies when the toxins are in
our brains. We know more now, we are smarter than this now. Aren’t we? Can’t we
look back over the years at what’s worked and what hasn’t.
I overdosed twice. I was pumped out and pumped in and once
my body was better, I was sent home. But I was sick, sick stained, ready to
die. Had I not been so lucky I would have. I went to a private rehab, a private
rehab that cost £10,000 a month. £10,000 that my family didn’t have but they
were able to find in precious people. What could I have done? Being ill is a
luxury for the wealthy and dying is almost a certainty for the poor. Recently I read that there were no beds in any
mental health wards on the NHS. None. Zero. Nothing. There are stories of
people being put in beds miles from home, teenagers and children separated from
their families. It’s not enough. Not good enough at all. Because this isn’t
just about addiction, this is about mental health. When will mental health be
considered just health? When will it no longer be segregated and covered in
barbed wire, for horror films to written about, fear to be spread with, lives
to be played with.
The vulnerable have always been taken advantage of. The
dreadful cost of the Grenfell fire was only felt by the poor and the hiding.
Addicts are vulnerable, their disease tells them they want to die. It lies to
them and it’s a terrifying place to be. There are free ways to escape the pain,
but the place between using and that safety is a long and tough stretch during
which there is very little support. Charities do incredible things, staffed
with experienced survivors who know how hands should be held, know that
addiction is forever and therefore treatment must be forever. But they are few
and far between – underfunded and overshadowed by the promise of quick release,
by a week in hospital which may seem more appealing than confronting demons.
Getting sober is a battle, a bloody and hideous battle. It’s horrible and scary
and we cannot do it alone. Why must that mean that we pay through skin and bone
to be well? Why must that mean, just because this illness takes such an ugly
shape, that we ignore it on our streets?
It seems that the homeless addict loses his or her right to
be human. People pass a person who has passed out in filthy clothes but if that
person was suited, briefcase in hand, they would be much more ready to help.
Why do we lose our souls because of our bank balance? Everything else is
treated, but our mental health is so often ignored. It’s not good enough. Our
heroes are crowned – the famous drug survivors, the ones who sparkle in their
sobriety and use their celebrity to shout about how good it feels to be clean. We
need Russell Brand and his ilk – he inspires and he is proof that there is
another ‘country’ on the other side of the demon bridge but he is a one-off and
most of us don’t have his wonderful money and confidence to help to blast away
the agonies.
In the meantime, the ‘crack head’ on the corner is blamed,
belittled, berated and perhaps worst of all, invisible. He will keep scoring
until he dies unless someone ‘sees’ him and his many many ‘friends’. The people
who could make a real change need to dust off their glasses, look straight at
these struggling souls who are just minutes away from being you and me and come
up with some real answers.
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