Learning About Addiction Treatment, Part 5

I continue my series of blogs, starting here, about my journey into the addiction recovery field after I changed ‘career’ in 2000 from being a neuroscientist to working in the community. At the same time, I was still working as a Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Wales Swansea (now Swansea University) in the UK.

In an earlier blog, I briefly described how I led the national team that evaluated all projects funded by the National Assembly of Wales’s Drug and Alcohol Treatment Fund (DATF) for two years from mid-2000. Here is what I wrote in my recently published book Our Recovery Stories: Journeys from Drug and Alcohol Addiction about the DATF evaluation and my views about the UK drug treatment system at the time.

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‘Moral panics, the limits of science & personal responsibility’ by Bill White

Time-Crack kidsAnother classic from Bill White, illustrating how junk science can dominate the sensationalist media and create moral panic, which of course can be used for political gain.

‘From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, new patterns of crack cocaine use dominated cultural headlines in sensationalized media frenzies that sociologists refer to as moral panics. Other than cocaine-related violence, no aspect of this alarm garnered greater attention than the images of premature, cocaine-exposed infants trembling within incubators of neonatal intensive care units.  Those infants and children became widely caricatured as “crack babies” and “crack kids” and their images were exploited to forge new laws and policies that in turn fueled dramatic expansions of the U.S. criminal justice and child welfare systems.

Those most dramatically affected by the expansions were poor communities of color who witnessed unprecedented numbers of their young men imprisoned and their young women and children placed under the control of state child protection authorities.

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‘Sue: A Personal Story’ by Sue Murphy

2007_0118walpole0076“I was, what you were once described as in the 70s, ‘a problem child’. So to me, looking back, it was inevitable I ended up an addict.

My first love was LSD after postnatal depression. Not an excuse, just how it was. LSD was the only thing that made me feel alive. Until ecstasy. Wow, good days and they were until all the garbage arrived.

Skip many years, many tablets, many lines later and I found heroin. Or should I say it found me? It kept me enslaved for 15 years along with crack.

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