The New South Wales Opposition says that, if elected in March 2011, they will increase funding for drug rehabilitation programs.

Health spokeswoman, Jillian Skinner, says that part of their agenda will be to develop a “methadone exit strategy”.

The number of people addicted to methadone in NSW has risen to 19,500 — an increase of over 50 percent in the last ten years.

Jillian Skinner says, “What we have done is to replace other addictions with methadone addiction.

“Methadone was always intended as a short term strategy to stabilise their lives so they could get into other treatment.”

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It has been known for at least 15 years that methadone maintenance doesn’t work.

Workers at Melbourne’s Odyssey House were telling the media back in 1996 that methadone programs were “creating more  addiction than they were curing”. Among methadone-users they interviewed, not one had stopped using heroin. (Herald Sun, 24/1/1996)

We should be shutting down all clinics etc. claiming to “treat” addicts.

We should stop treating addiction as though it were a medical condition. If there must be rehabilitation programs, let them be compulsory and legally supervised.

Addicts aren’t victims of forces acting outside them. They have the power of making choices.

Addicts prefer to surround themselves with people who will cover up for them, give them money or even — in the case of some perverse governments — give them supplies of the drugs that are destroying them.

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Addicts seek the company of anyone who will listen to them repeatedly telling how hard life has been to them.

These people need, on the contrary, to learn about and experience, the consequences of actions.

For example, if you spend all your money on drugs you will have no money.

If you steal money to fund drugs you will be put in prison.

The best way to help addicts is to make the connection between actions and consequence as direct and unmistakeable as possible.

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It is also important that the general public be helped to realise that “drug withdrawal symptoms” are mostly in the mind.

That the seriousness of withdrawal symptoms, medically speaking, is such that the strongest medication a person needs to get through them is something like Panadol.

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