Only those with ice in their veins would not have felt sympathy watching Millie Elder bury her head in her arms as she left court. Paul Holmes never said a truer word than when he told the media scrum that Millie is sick. She has a big hill to climb.

I supported a friend through drug and alcohol rehabilitation. That person, probably like Millie, had gone downhill for some time. I just thought it was bad behaviour. I didn't understand addiction is a disease like diabetes or heart disease, except addicts in New Zealand have few places to go for help.

Like anyone else with mental health problems, they're disgracefully neglected.

The person I love went into the private Capri clinic in Auckland. We were lucky to be in a position to find the $15,000 for the expert treatment this clinic provides. In hindsight, it was an investment and, if we hadn't turned to Capri and its chief executive Tom Claunch, that money would have paid for a funeral.

But New Zealanders without access to money are at the mercy of waiting to be seen at community treatment centres, where counsellors do their best in the face of overwhelming odds.

To this country's shame, successive governments have closed down certified residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres until we now have only two, in Auckland and Christchurch.

The wonderful Queen Mary Hospital in Hanmer Springs, where the Ministry of Health funded drug and alcohol rehabilitation and which saved hundreds of lives, was forced to close when the Labour Government or the Canterbury District Health Board (depending on who is pointing the finger of blame) pulled the plug on funding. There was an outcry, but to no avail.

Just last month, Wellington coroner Garry Evans called for more certified institutions. His comments came after a 45-year-old Petone woman drank herself to death because her family couldn't get her into treatment.

But the public are ignorant. One Wellington letter-to-the-editor writer blamed bad parenting for youth drinking and drug taking; the failure to point out right from wrong. How wonderful the world would be if we were all as perfect as this father. His sanctimonious attitude, however, will not prevent his children from getting Alzheimer's, just as perfect parenting can't protect some people genetically predisposed to addiction.

We're not talking here about binge drinking, or urban liberals smoking cannabis in their Grey Lynn villas. We're talking about roughly 10 per cent of the population with a genetic disorder which makes them physiologically unable to drink or do drugs. The Ministry of Health's policy of harm minimisation is a travesty. These people can never touch alcohol again, not even in cough medicine or desserts. They have the disease of more, as Claunch calls it.