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[…] how many people would turn up. But I looked forward to the day, wondering what would be said – and if I would have the courage to say or ask anything. I was really surprised by the turnout. The people that attended obviously cared about what was going on in our criminal justice system and the fact that there were women in jail, and that maybe most them shouldn’t be. The lady who had organised the conference came over and gave me a little slip of paper with a question on it that she would like me to read out for one of the prisoners. She also explained that the whole conference was being recorded for a BBC programme, and I tried not to panic. The question was to panellist Eoin McLennon-Murray. It said: ‘Why does probation constantly over populate our prisons for breeching? If circumstances were taken into consideration, sometimes the reasons should be valid and recognised. After all it costs over £53,bbb to the tax player to put/keep someone in prison for a year.’ He replied that he agreed probation held too much power when it came […]
DDNjan11
[…] how many people would turn up. But I looked forward to the day, wondering what would be said – and if I would have the courage to say or ask anything. I was really surprised by the turnout. The people that attended obviously cared about what was going on in our criminal justice system and the fact that there were women in jail, and that maybe most them shouldn’t be. The lady who had organised the conference came over and gave me a little slip of paper with a question on it that she would like me to read out for one of the prisoners. She also explained that the whole conference was being recorded for a BBC programme, and I tried not to panic. The question was to panellist Eoin McLennon-Murray. It said: ‘Why does probation constantly over populate our prisons for breeching? If circumstances were taken into consideration, sometimes the reasons should be valid and recognised. After all it costs over £53,bbb to the tax player to put/keep someone in prison for a year.’ He replied that he agreed probation held too much power when it came […]
Addiction Treatment Directory
The Addiction Treatment Directory providing a comprehensive listing of residential addiction treatment services.
Phoenix Futures residential drug treatment
[…] Karen Biggs. ‘We are proud of our history which has seen us grow from a single pioneering residential service to a national organisation with services in community, prisons housing and residential settings. We have adapted our approach over the years to meet the changing needs of our service users, their families and society but […]
Correct methadone dosage vital for people being treated for TB
Methadone dose optimisation is vital when treating people on opioid substitution programmes for tuberculosis (TB) and other conditions, according to new research. Researchers at Aston University’s School of Pharmacy, in partnership with Addaction, looked at how methadone interacts with drugs used to treat other medical conditions. Anti-TB drug rifampicin is known to increase the breakdown […]
CZAR GAZING – Finding the right balance
As deputy drug czar for the Blair government, Mike Trace oversaw the expansion of today’s drug and alcohol treatment system. In the fifth of his series of articles he gives his personal view of the successes and failures of the past 20 years, and the challenges the sector now faces... Read it in DDN Magazine. […]
Soapbox
[…] lives, down significantly from 2001 when it was more than one in four. This fall is likely the result of targeted hepatitis B vaccination programmes, including in prisons, which saw vaccination rates among drug injectors leap from 37 per cent in 2001 to 76 per cent in 2011. There is no equivalent hepatitis C […]
A space to grow
We are failing to reach women, connect with them and provide a safe environment in treatment, hears DDN. Read the full article in DDN here Drug-related deaths among women are the highest since records began. In the decade since 2006 there was a 95 per cent increase in women dying as a result of drug […]
Lack of harm reduction services impeding HIV progress, warns UNAIDS
Around 99 per cent of people who inject drugs live in countries that are failing to provide adequate harm reduction services, says a new report from UNAIDS. Despite overall new HIV infections declining globally, infection rates among people who use drugs remain unchanged, says Health, rights and drugs: harm reduction, decriminalisation and zero discrimination for […]
A capital idea
WDP’s Capital Card scheme has been helping to incentivise and empower service users, the team tells DDN. Read the full article in DDN Magazine People who come into drug and alcohol services looking for support and treatment are very often also experiencing profound isolation from their communities. Not only can this be damaging to their […]
CZAR GAZING – The golden years
As deputy drug czar for the Blair government, Mike Trace oversaw the expansion of today’s drug and alcohol treatment system. In the first of a new series, he gives his personal view of the successes and failures of the past 20 years, and the challenges the sector now faces. Read it in DDN Magazine. It […]
‘Never forget kindness in a results-driven age’
Never under-estimate the power of kindness and a safe space. The SWOP project featured in our cover story showcases the best kind of outreach – meeting people at the stage they’re at, offering comfort and safety first and foremost, and then providing the first links to a network of support. It’s a way of working, […]
DDN Information
[…] covering. This circulation ensures that we are available not just to those working in specialist treatment but are also read by the wider health and social care sector, housing, mental health services, prisons and criminal justice. To find out about advertising a job, event or service please contact ian@cjwellings.com DDN email updates
Playing the long game
Tony Adams’ glittering football career could not mask deep-seated problems that needed to be tackled. He shared his story at the NHSSMPA conference. ‘You don’t suddenly become an addict – there’s a path, a journey,’ Tony Adams told the NHSSMPA conference. Adams’ 19-year football career had included 669 matches for Arsenal and 66 for England […]
Your shout!
[…] stop putting that out there – we work in co-operating with all. Allan Houston, by email ***************** On course? What happened before treatment courses were available in prisons and specifically to ‘lifers’? My view is simple – lifers were released without interventions of any kind. If the historical perspective is to be believed, lifers […]
A foot in the door
Seeking healthcare can be daunting for homeless people. DDN visits a practice in north London that takes every opportunity to engage. Read this article in DDN ‘We haven’t touched the sides of the people sleeping on the streets around here. Everybody comes to Camden, they come to Euston train station, they come to Kings Cross, […]
Scotland records highest ever drug deaths
Scotland has yet again recorded its highest ever number of drug-related deaths, at 934. The 2017 figure is 8 per cent up on the previous year (DDN, September 2017, page 4) and more than double the number from a decade ago. Scotland’s drug-death rate remains the highest of any EU country, and is around two […]
Media Savvy
The news, and the skews, in the national media When law enforcement officers call for drugs to be legalised, we have to listen. So too when doctors speak up. Last month the Royal College of Physicians took the important step of coming out in favour of decriminalisation, joining the BMA, the Faculty of Public Health, […]
Commissioners call for joined-up approach to opioid use disorder decision-making
Expert Faculty on Commissioning confirms speakers for ‘EXCO’, the first joint congress on excellence in commissioning for opioid use disorder. The Expert Faculty on Commissioning will hold the first integrated meeting for commissioners and other experts focused on opioid use disorder (OUD) care. The event on 22 June 2018 is entitled ‘Excellence in Commissioning for […]
Families First Workshops
Conference Workshops Here are the workshop topics that will be covered on the day between 1.45 – 2.45 pm. Details of where they are held will be available at the venue. The child’s place in cycle of recovery. Delivered by Pete Griffin from Earlybreak: www.earlybreak.co.uk In an interactive session based on two case studies, delegates will learn to identify how the […]
Regulated cannabis market would generate ‘£1bn’ in tax
Introducing a legalised, regulated cannabis market in the UK would generate ‘at least £1bn in tax income, if not more’, according to a report from the Health Poverty Action NGO. The money could then be ring-fenced to support the NHS as well as education and harm reduction programmes, it says. With the Canadian senate about […]
Legal Line
Release solicitor Kirstie Douse answers your legal questions in her regular column Reader’s question: I am a landlord of a flat that I own and rent out, and I think the tenants may be growing cannabis. I live in a different city so I’m not there often, but the last few times I have visited recently […]
Making pathways for commissioning
Commissioners are on a mission to do things better. But how can they take on board the many complex health issues with less money in the pot? DDN reports. There’s much talk of developing innovative commissioning practice – prompted, in the main, by the need to ‘do more with less’. As part of the refining […]
Media Savvy
[…] schizophrenic or an alcoholic, defined by their diagnosis. Elizabeth Romer, BMJ, 12 February You can tell the state of a society, said Alexis de Tocqueville, by its prisons. Today you tell it by its attitude to drugs. Ten years ago the Labour government recklessly upgraded cannabis from class C to class B, ‘because of concerns […]
Fighting response
A Calderdale-based service is combining treatment provision with hosting an emerging recovery community. Michelle Foster explains the ‘warrior down’ concept I took a call from a friend in December, who had been contacted by the desperate mother of a 43-year-old daughter. The daughter, who we’ll call Rachel, had been out of a residential rehab for […]
A level playing field
Effective treatment starts with a meaningful partnership, says Dr Steve Brinksman. We recently had a new doctor join our practice who had worked elsewhere for a number of years. I was chatting to her about how she was settling in and interested to hear that she felt the biggest difference was that we were a […]
Hit Hot Topics: The word on the streets
The Word on the Streets This year’s Hit Hot Topics asked, how can we give harm reduction most impact on the frontline? DDN reports, pics by Nigel Brunsdon. ‘What the heck are we doing, criminalising people for what they do to themselves?’ Nanna Gotfredson is the founder of Gadejuristen, the ‘Street Lawyers’ of Denmark. She […]
Risks of pregabalin and gabapentin
[…] chronic pain, where we were seeing the use of long-term, high-dose opiates. ‘It was then, four or five years ago, that we started hearing that, particularly in prisons, these drugs had a street value and people were using them illicitly. Drug users recognised them as another way of altering their state of mind and […]
A sense of purpose
Helping people to regain their stake in society can help to transform lives, says Amar Lodhia. We’ve been trying to get our heads around government policy on ‘joined-up’ working between departments to tackle multiple social disadvantage. Trawling through the well-presented but often redundant strategy documents, it is evident that while self-employment is an incredibly powerful […]
Time for social action
Social action is the way forward in tackling complex needs, hears DDN. The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Complex Needs and Dual Diagnosis recently launched a call for evidence around social action (DDN, May, page 5). With a detailed questionnaire, the group wanted to know what factors could really make a difference in helping […]
Your letters
We welcome your letters… Please email them to claire@cjwellings.com or post them to The Editor, DDN Magazine, CJ Wellings Ltd, 57 High Street, Ashford TN24 8SG. Letters may be edited for space or clarity – please limit submissions to 350 words. Clear sighted I was very heartened to read the interview with Alliance founder […]
Delayed drug strategy promises ‘national recovery champion’
The government’s long-awaited drug strategy has finally been published, and includes both a new ‘national recovery champion’ role and a cross-government drug strategy board to be chaired by the home secretary, Amber Rudd. The UK will ‘drive global action and enhance its leadership in the international response to drugs’, the government states. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there […]
Market forces
Drug-related deaths: A strong message from Addaction’s Mortality Matters conference was that treatment services need to put competition to one side and challenge the conditions that are allowing drug-related deaths to rise. DDN reports. How should we tackle the alarming increase in drug-related deaths head on, asked Addaction’s medical director, Dr Kostas Agath, opening the […]
Speaker Biographies
Steve Brinksman, GP Dr Steve Brinksman has been a GP in Birmingham for the past 20 years and is the clinical lead for the Substance Misuse Management in General Practice network (SMMGP), working alongside drug and alcohol users since the start of his career. He is also DDN magazine’s regular ‘Post-its from Practice’ […]
On a mission to cure hep C
[…] proportion than the 4.2 per cent in the rest of the country), and only one in three London boroughs has a hep C testing-to-treatment pathway. In London’s prisons the situation is similarly poor, says PHE, with only 6.4 per cent of new receptions reported as having been tested, compared with 7.8 per cent in […]
Lib Dems promise legal cannabis market
The Liberal Democrats have made a manifesto commitment to decriminalise the possession of illegal drugs for personal use and introduce a ‘legal, regulated’ market for cannabis. The latter would ‘break the grip’ of criminal gangs and raise £1bn in annual tax revenues, says their manifesto document, which also pledges to repeal the controversial Psychoactive Substances […]
Should an old conviction count against my criminal injuries application?
Release solicitor Kirstie Douse answers your legal questions in her regular Legal Line column Reader’s question:Last year I was violently attacked on my way home from work. I had to have a number of operations on my face and still have visible scars. I am also psychologically affected – I can’t work, only leave the […]
More choice, more options
New versions of drugs are constantly being developed and trialled, including injections of naltrexone and buprenorphine that can last up to six months, as well as a rapidly dissolving buprenorphine wafer, now approved in the UK as Espranor. It hasn’t always been the case, but opioid substitution therapy is now accepted as a key instrument […]
DDN March 2017
‘One of the strongest messages was a simple one: isolation kills’ We had to make drug-related deaths the focus of this year’s conference. The room was packed with people that were directly affected, as demonstrated by the question, ‘who in this room has lost someone?’ We heard about keyworkers struggling with huge caseloads, and the […]
Power of ten
[…] services out of the equation, but there’s no reason why we can’t engage with this and challenge those fractures.’ The fractured system between commissioning for treatment in prisons and in the community was also putting people at risk, he said. ‘The first thing that needs to happen is to engage with people outside the […]
‘Unprecedented’ purity levels for heroin, cocaine and ecstasy
Heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine and MDMA are now being sold at ‘unprecedented’ levels of purity, according to the latest DrugWise survey of the UK’s street drugs market. This confirms a trend of rising purity levels detected since 2014, says Highways and buyways: a snapshot of UK drug scenes 2016, which is based on interviews with […]
DDN February 2017
Welcome to our latest issue! ‘The situation requires a real shake-up in the way we engage’ ‘We begin to categorise and stigmatise without even realising it,’ said a speaker at the recent ‘Hit Hot Topics’. Throughout the event we heard how ‘language can become perception’ and be very alienating. We also heard about people who inject […]
Across the great divide
[…] lack of momentum to prioritise harm reduction – had scaled down progress in many countries. Referring to HRI’s latest biennial report, she highlighted that harm reduction in prisons ‘lies far behind what’s available in the community’, with several programmes closing since the last report and Spain being ‘the only country that has anything up […]
Tailored treatment needed for prescription drug misuse, says ACMD
Prescription-only drugs are being widely diverted to supplement the use of illegal substances, according to a new report from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD). However, diversion and illicit supply remains a ‘much smaller problem’ than in the US, it states. Diverted prescription drugs are supplementing, rather than replacing, the use of […]
A participant’s view: Highlights from the GPs’ conference
Lee Collingham shares his highlights from the GPs’ conference on managing drug and alcohol problems Dr Stephen Willott, clinical lead for alcohol and drug misuse at NHS Nottingham City and conference chair, introduced the event’s theme as addressing drug-related deaths, which not only continue to rise in England but are twice the European average. It […]
Naloxone outreach – Reaching out
[…] ‘extensive homeless populations’, as well as talking to hospitals to make sure people who have been admitted with an overdose are discharged with naloxone, and working with prisons around giving naloxone on release. ‘There’s no closed door on how we can get naloxone outreach to people,’ says Smith. ‘We talk to the police about […]
Rodrigo Duterte’s punishing regime
[…] technical assistance in developing and implementing evidence-based and humane drug policy responses,’ she says. This help could cover the health and welfare of detainees in ‘horrifically overcrowded prisons’, the more than 700,000 people who have surrendered themselves to the authorities ‘mostly for using or having used drugs, or simply being arbitrarily placed ona published […]
Learning curve: Involving social work students in substance misuse
Bringing together social work students and people in recovery gave an opportunity to share skills and knowledge, as Marelize Joubert reports. Attending a substance misuse conference with the theme of recovery gave social work students at Sheffield Hallam University the chance to find out more about drug and alcohol services, listen first hand to peer mentors’ […]
Reasons to be cheerful
Paul Hayes is determinedly upbeat in the aftermath of Brexit The country currently has no government, no prime minister, no opposition, no friends, and may soon disintegrate – and that’s ignoring the football! As we pass through the most profound political crisis since the war, what are the implications for the alcohol and drug treatment […]
Letters July/August 2016
[…] and alcohol use in the town has escalated, which also means more begging and crime. Police are caught up in almost petty stuff, then the courts and prisons are full with people for short sentences – no time to be rehabilitated and no staff even if they were there longer. Bournemouth cut the day […]
The end, my friend
Dr Steve Brinksman calls for kindness and compassion in palliative care. Most of us don’t like to think about dying and we are probably even worse at talking about it. Yet as the average age of those in opiate treatment is increasing alongside co-morbid physical health problems, I am seeing more and more people who […]
PDF Version
[…] how many people would turn up. But I looked forward to the day, wondering what would be said – and if I would have the courage to say or ask anything. I was really surprised by the turnout. The people that attended obviously cared about what was going on in our criminal justice system and the fact that there were women in jail, and that maybe most them shouldn’t be. The lady who had organised the conference came over and gave me a little slip of paper with a question on it that she would like me to read out for one of the prisoners. She also explained that the whole conference was being recorded for a BBC programme, and I tried not to panic. The question was to panellist Eoin McLennon-Murray. It said: ‘Why does probation constantly over populate our prisons for breeching? If circumstances were taken into consideration, sometimes the reasons should be valid and recognised. After all it costs over £53,bbb to the tax player to put/keep someone in prison for a year.’ He replied that he agreed probation held too much power when it came […]
Muted response to first ungass since 1990s
The world needs global drug policies that ‘put people first’, UNODC executive director Yury Fedotov told the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs in New York, although many campaigning organisations have expressed disappointment at the event’s outcomes. The session, the first since 1998, was originally scheduled for 2019 but was brought forward following […]
Letters, May 2016
Bull at a gate The ‘raging bull’ cover (March issue and Colin Miller-Hoare’s letter, April, page 12) was exactly what was needed to express the current state of the sector – a perfect expression of the passion and dedication that is evident, and indeed needed, to maintain our position in the current arena. Personally I’m […]
‘Put people first,’ Fedotov tells UNGASS
The world needs global drug policies that ‘put people first’, UNODC executive director Yury Fedotov told the opening session of the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs. The session also saw the official adoption of an ‘outcome document’ that has been greeted with dismay by drugs campaigners, who have branded it ‘disconnected from […]
April issue
[…] from all areas of family support – not just those working directly in drug and alcohol treatment, but professionals with expertise in parenting, child poverty, schools and prisons.They looked at issues from family members’ perspectives, and shared knowledge and expertise. We may be looking across a very uncertain commissioning landscape but it’s good to […]