Garth George: Mixing addictions is rough treatment

Drug and alcohol counsellor Roger Brooking, in an article on page 2 of this section on Monday, made some very valid points, particularly that while there were an estimated 55,000 methamphetamine addicts in this country there were at least 700,000 problem drinkers.

He suggested, quite rightly, that the Government's $7 million-a-year boost for P treatment was a "drop in the bucket" compared with the country's addiction problems. And that the up to 60 extra beds announced by the Government last month would enable an extra 1000 people to be treated each year, which would make little difference after years of closures and underfunding.

Mr Brooking, clinical manager of Alcohol and Drug Counselling in Wellington, pointed out that more than 10 residential treatment centres had closed in the past 10 years.

That struck a chord with me because when I was fighting a losing battle against chronic alcohol addiction there were Health Department-owned and run treatment centres all over the country, including Villa 4 at Kingseat Hospital and Wolfe Home at Carrington Hospital.

Every state mental institution had a unit specifically for the treatment of alcoholism, and Queen Mary Hospital at Hanmer Springs was devoted entirely to that. It was considered, under Dr Tom Maling and later Dr Robert Crawford, to be one of the best such treatment centres in the world. They are all gone.

What Mr Brooking did not say, and being an alcohol and drug counsellor he probably wouldn't even think of it, is that the partially state-funded community services which were supposed to replace the state institutions have been required to treat alcoholics, drug addicts and others such as overeaters and gamblers all in the same programme.

And the result has been that the success rate in the treatment of addictions has dropped from very small to negligible.

I recovered initially in the Salvation Army Bridge Programme, which in those days (the 1970s) was almost entirely independent of the state.

It treated alcoholics only, was staffed solely by Christians and recovering alcoholics, and the only state contribution was from the sickness benefit paid to patients.

But since the Bridge Programme began taking a per diem grant from the Government it has had to cater for all the addictions and employ outsiders. The result has been disastrous, for alcoholics in particular.

For I am persuaded that the psychology of alcoholism, with which I am all too intimately familiar, and of hard drug addiction are quite different, let alone the psychologies of overeating and gambling.

Thus, the 60 or 70 extra residential beds the Government will provide this year at treatment centres such as Odyssey House, the Bridge Programme, Higher Ground and other centres will have a minimal effect on the lives of those who become addicted to one substance or another.

Meanwhile, the estimated annual cost of alcohol misuse, now at $5 billion a year, will continue to climb; more and more Kiwis, most of them young, will become binge drinkers and the percentage of offences reported to police in which alcohol is a factor will continue to climb above its present 31.

Thousands of Kiwi heavy drinkers will this year suffer irreparable brain damage, including some who were born with it because their mothers drank when they were pregnant.

About 1000 New Zealanders will die from alcohol-related causes - suicide, motor and other accidents, fires and drownings, or any one of many illnesses brought on by excessive alcohol consumption.

And alcohol will continue to trigger thousands of cases of teenage pregnancy, marriage break-ups, domestic violence, child abuse, vicious assault, manslaughter and murder, while prisons will continue to overflow with criminals who were under the influence of alcohol when they committed their crimes.

But treatment centres, even alcoholics-only ones which should be quickly reinstituted, are really nothing more than ambulances at the bottom of the cliff.

What we should be looking at - and, fortunately the Law Commission and others are - is what is to be done to prevent alcohol addiction in the first place.

In a document prepared for submission to the Law Commission in November last year, a group of health professionals from all over New Zealand, calling themselves Alcohol Action NZ, proposed what they called a "5+ solution".

It is based on what the group called a "seminal World Health Organisation sponsored publication, Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity", which, it said, provided some of the best scientific evidence available about ways alcohol damage can be reduced in a society.

Their 5+ solution is: (1) Raise alcohol prices; (2) raise the purchase age; (3) reduce alcohol accessibility; (4) reduce marketing and advertising; and (5) increase drink-driving counter-measures and treatment opportunities for heavy drinkers.

These are so obvious that even politicians of the most limited intelligence should insist that every one of them be instituted forthwith.

Because providing an extra few million for the treatment of P addiction is not just a drop in the bucket, it's pissing into the wind.

garth.george@hotmail.com