On this government’s ideas about cutting benefits to drug and alcohol users unless they agree to treatment:
Don’t think that punishing drug and alcohol users cures drug and alcohol addiction. If only.
I’ve reposted below a transcript from an interview that I did in 2013 with a guy in Stroud called Darren. When I met him, Darren was trying to beat a years-long heroin addiction. I have a number of interviews with people with serious addiction problems who I’ve spoken to over the last five or so years – people whose supported-living hostels were closed, or who were in and out of street homelessness, usually because they had serious mental health and addiction problems. The Marah organisation in Stroud introduced me to Darren. When I met him at a drop-in lunch, he told me that he’d walked from Cheltenham to Stroud to escape the Cheltenham drug scene. He was living in a tent that Marah had given him, if memory serves. It didn’t sound as though he was having the greatest time in the world. Nobody does when it comes to addiction.
So…this notion that you can push, threaten, or somehow menace someone out of addiction: the main reason that I doubt that’ll work is because I’ve tried it. Everyone who has an addict in the family has tried it. A lot of the time, you try very hard. You certainly try many things. You scream a lot and deny money and affection, and all the rest of it. You run away and come back. You go to Al-Anon meetings for Families Of, decide the key to coping is to change yourself and get nowhere much with that. You do all of these things and often reach commitments, and even as everybody is agreeing to those, the person with the addiction problem steps out of the room and goes off and gets slaughtered.
The punitive approach achieves nothing. If only it did, as I say. People with addiction problems either make the monumental decision to attempt sobriety, or they don’t. If the disease is bigger than an addict’s ability to beat it – and it often is, because addiction is a very big disease – then there we are.
No amount of bullying alters that. Threats mean nothing. Threats to cut money certainly mean nothing. People who get to the stage we’re talking about have often lost everything anyway – money, family, homes, friends, health, cognitive function, the works. Losing JSA or ESA for several weeks or months would surely just be another calamity – a calamity for the family, too, if there’s still one around. I would rather see less stick and more carrot myself. I’d like to see decently-funded support and accommodation for everyone – that’s people who want to get sober and people who don’t, or can’t. I would say this: governments that were truly concerned about addicts would probably not cut funding to the support services that people find helpful. They would certainly not chuck round ideas like threatening people with benefit cuts for therapy no-shows while cutting support service funding. That sort of juxtaposition would reveal something underhand about such a government. I personally think there should even be room for investment in concepts like wet houses. There was a time when I found the thought of wet houses a kind of comfort, in the sense that the wet-house idea suggested that some people understood addiction could not always be fixed, but that people caught in addition still deserved to be treated like people. Even now, that sort of idea seems more humane than government threats to deny people in the throes of an addiction nightmare their already-measly benefit payments.
I also think that government needs to get away from this crowd-pleasing notion that everyone with problems can and should be fixed. Does government really think that someone in the throes of addiction will start prioritising in the way government wants – putting food before drink and so on? We’ve been canvassing this at @hangbitch towers recently. We think not.
Anyway: Darren, Stroud, 2013.
“I’m trying to apply for employment and support allowance. I’m getting that for mental health issues and addiction drug dependency. I’m on antidepressants at the moment. My health is at risk. I’ve gone from ten stone one to eight and a half stone in four weeks, living on the streets. I lived in London on the streets for three years. At half six every morning, the cleaners at the back of the Savoy come down, and the council, and moved you on. The daycentre didn’t open until eight, so you just had to walk around.
“I’ve had my ESA suspended. I was using a care-of address and they’ve got me down at the social as actually living there. Me and my girlfriend were staying at this bloke’s house and the lady next door had grief with him… they contacted the social and they suspended my pay, saying that I’m paying in for my girlfriend, so I’ve had no money for the last eight weeks. I told them it was a care-of address.
“I live in the tent [at the moment]. There are two drinkers [in the same area] but they’re okay. You stay in numbers, you’re better in numbers. The tent’s dry, but the only problem is that it’s on a dry riverbed, so when the rain comes down, it’s all mud. It’s all mud. They won’t give us accommodation until we’ve been here for 12 months, because we’ve got no local connection. But after 12 months, we have. I walked from Cheltenham to here about three, four months ago. I walked 17 miles and I slept in a bus stop. I went to the Salvation from there and they gave me a lift to this place.
“I left Cheltenham because I wanted to get clean off the heroin. I’ve got a script. I have been clean for four weeks – stone cold turkey, but I done it. You thought that would have been the worst time to use, really. I’m getting on an emergency script next week. They’ve got me on these meetings – anger management, self-awareness, acupuncture. I get suicidal thoughts and things like that. Then, I’m going to rehab.
“Don’t get much hassle with [living in] the tent. There’s a bloke who comes down every morning and brings me a big flask of coffee. People have brought down a little camping stove, a little gas flask, and say “you need it more than me” and brought down pots and pans, but I do need to get off the streets. That’s a priority really. I stink of fire all the time [because of cooking outdoors]. I’m not usually like this. I’m only dirty because I’m sleeping on the streets and the fire.
“I was on heroin the first time round for about 12 years. Then I got clean. I was on methadone but I stopped that. That made me really ill. Then I got clean, but then I went on Suboxone. Then, I relapsed, because I went to a friend’s funeral who died of an overdose. When I came to Stroud, I had a raging habit, but since I’ve been here, I’ve been working with Turning Point.”
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Not much else to say on that, I guess. On it goes.
Rarely a truer set of words Kate xx
Xx
Expensive addictions are easier to handle one way or another if one has a suitably large source of income not just for daily living but for treating the addiction one way or another. Would addicts be docked benefit for not being available for work or being absent for too long from their home address while in rehab?
Are the proponents of ‘tough love’ reforms addicted to forcing their ideas down the throats of people less fortunate than themselves? Anyhow, while I have never even ‘experimented’ with more than a joint, I draw attention to Keith Richards example of ‘if the addict has access to the money to feed the addiction’, some people manage to get away with it. Keith Richards And Drugs: Rolling Stones Guitarist Slams Rehab And Has No Regrets
I can’t believe that most decent people, even if they voted conservative, wanted all this to happen. That the government would then ride roughshod over the poorest, the weakest, and the most vulnerable in society.
I tend to agree with that. I don’t know if people really have a great view on some of the things that are going on. I never used to, especially when I was younger. That’s one of the reasons why I think it’s possible to make the case for social security again, one person at a time. It is possible to show people something different and something better. That’s how I found out anyway.
Brilliant post, Kate. I noticed that with some people, there seems to be an attitude that “if I manage to do this, then so should everyone else”.
I call it Health Privilege but it’s sometimes known as Ableism in US. It’s when people measure everybody else’s capabilities after what they themselves can achieve. So if they managed to “snap out of depression” or “beat an addiction” – then so should everyone else!
And this gets deadly when paired with Wealth Privilege. When those from well-off backgrounds imagine that it’s just as easy for a working class person to sign up for a private rehab or pay for endless therapy sessions whilst living off savings if they don’t work. Trisha Goddard is UK’s Health/Wealth Privilege poster child. “Nothing that a few months therapy can’t fix” she happily squeaks as if everyone’s emotional pain can get healed with a few strokes of CBT. Yeah Trisha, it’s great that you learned to cope with your depression. But what has that to do with other people’s problems?
I sometimes want to scream on top of my lungs when I hear how middle or upper class people also have problems. Know what? Yes, they have as much pain in their lives too. After all, there is no hierarchy to pain. But their circumstances are different. Their circumstances are a million miles away from what poor people experience when faced with same or similar problems.
I mean, are there any free, good quality, long-term therapies or rehabs available through NHS? If so, then how long would you need to wait? And how many hoops & hurdles do you need to jump just to access them? Not to mention trying to get benefits in the meanwhile. And oh, not forgetting how low quality, low paid, insecure jobs (or worse: workfare) cause people to catapult into severe depressions & risk drug relapses.
There is also another paradox. It’s when we have punitively high expectations of ourselves which leads us to become judgemental & punitive of others. It is after all easier to focus & obsess about other people’s problems than to solve our own. Especially if we do not have these problems ourselves. Which is what leads so many people to believe in this whole Tough Love quackery, I think.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with setting boundaries when refusing to lend money to addicts. But there’s something deeply disturbing about denying addicts food & shelter by stopping their benefits.
The irony is, I don’t think Tories mind the drugs. On the contrary, cocaine is free flowing amongst successful entrepreneurs, financiers, showbiz people, etc, etc. Nor do Tories mind financial dependency. If they did, they would have abolished inherited wealth, the Monarchy & Made in Chelsea crowd. What they do mind is sharing their often inherited wealth with others by paying taxes & decent, living wages.
What better excuse to hang onto their taxshyness & fair wage avoidance than to trumpet about the great “injustice” of paying for poorer people’s addictions… All whilst ignoring how everyone else pays for their own reckless spending & other upper-class addictions.
Cheers for this plebrise. The thing is – I pay tax and I wouldn’t mind some of it going into places and support for people who just can’t make sobriety. Beats forking out tax to bomb Iraqis or whoever is next in line for some democracy treatment. Actually – it beats forking out for MPs’ subsidised intake allowances as well, now that I think about it. Some people just can’t get to sobriety and frankly you’re usually punished enough when you get to that sort of point so it’s up to the rest of us to be civil when that happens to people I think. Boozing to death certainly ain’t no picnic, for you or anyone around you.
On the matter of ‘paying tax’, though claimants of JSA or ESA don’t pay income tax, we do pay VAT and other taxes.
And we pay more VAT on our daily activity equipment than Government ministers do on theirs!
All the more reason for us to have our say, too.
With heroin addiction, there is also the matter that prison is a breeding ground for heroin addiction, as Jeffrey Archer’s Prison Diaries revealed. BBC news report: How drugs end up behind bars.
Testing for prsioners’ drugs consumption is a factor. Cannabis and cocaine take 28 days to leave the body; heroin just 3 days. Thus heroin consumption can be more rarely detected, however much more it is made prevalent by routine testing procedures.
A Howard League for Penal Reform spokesperson Steve Taylor says in the same BBC news story, “It does the guards a favour to deal with people who just vegetate.”
And stress and loss of hope make addiction more tempting. A 1970’s song by Joan Baez puts it very simply in the second verse of her ‘Prison Trilogy’ song, a verse that addresses the case of a young Mexican who crossed the border in search of a better life for his family and winds up in prison for doing so illegally, “He eased the pain inside him with a needle in his arm.” Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose)
Cuts to job prospects and support services make life more painful, and inadequate benefit levels with no job prospects make crime more tempting. In for a needle? Do the cuts merchants apply ‘joined up thinking’?
In the concluding paragraph there, I should have written,
In for a morsel, in for a needle?
Definitely think the worse people’s situations get, the more likely they are to use if that’s an issue. Of course people drink and use more if they’re sleeping outside in a freezing park. It’s the only way to forget shit and get to sleep. A few times when I’ve sat out with people for an hour, I’ve got so cold that I’ve had to leave. Couldn’t stand it. It’s unreal. Can’t imagine what it’s like doing that night after night.
I must admit that it’s only with maturity, informing myself, suffering so much myself from a physical illness, then having a family member with addiction/mental health problems, that has changed the attitudes that I had towards this subject.
Seeing people first hand self destruct; the impossible situation, a never ending roundabout that gets them nowhere. The helplessness you feel when you’ve tried everything, but nothing works. Never knowing if the next phone call or knock at the door is going to be your worst nightmare.
I read an actual DWP document about all various illnesses – presumably referred to by the DM in disability issues. It stated that research proved that someone with a mental illness who had not recovered after 6 years was unlikely ever to recover fully. You could easily relate that to addiction, because it’s mental health problems and despair that often leads to addiction. Some will never recover, or will just spend their lives in relay between severe addiction and brief periods of abstinence (but never long enough for them to get back onto their feet).
One thing that’s been neglected in the debate surrounding this DWP decision, is that many people new to addiction may decide not to seek help at all, afraid that if they do approach their G.P., the information may get into the hands of the DWP. Ironically then, this scheme will actually deter people from seeking help and possibly changing their lives for the good.
As you say though Kate, the services to help such people have diminished drastically, so it’s like saying to a claimant who has broken both legs that he/she needs treatment to get them back to work, when there is no treatment because the NHS don’t fix broken legs any more, but the DWP say ‘well that’s your problem, so we’re stopping your money until you get it fixed’.
I’ll say it over and again: Kafkaesque to the extreme!
I am really happy I’ve come across this post. After watching shows like “Intervention” and getting advice from friends and family it often seems like the “tough love” approach is the way to go when trying to get through to someone dealing with addiction. I want to recommend a book I recently read that really opened my eyes to a different look at addiction. It is called “Addiction is the Symptom” by Dr. Rosemary Brown (http://addiction-is-the-symptom.com/) It is hard for a non-addict to understand, and sympathize with an addict sometimes. That is why I feel it is crucial for us that deal with the addiction of a loved one, to educate ourselves to better understand what they are going through. This book offers some great insight and information that I have not found anywhere else in my studies. It gave me a way to look beyond the actual addiction itself (the symptom) and better search out and heal the emotional problems behind it. I really hope you and your readers will check out this book!
I guess the actual meaning of Tough Love could well be very different from what Tories twist it to.
Threatening to stop or actually stopping benefits for addicts, depressives, etc. on the grounds of them allegedly refusing treatment was probably not what the original Tough Love advocates proposed. But if they did, then they are clueless about poverty & should not be allowed anywhere near decision making policies affecting the poor.
I don’t care if addicts, or any other group Tories wish to attack, refuse treatments or not. What I care about is whether they have a roof over their heads & food on the table. The latter requires benefits if they are out of work. It really is that simple.