Eric Carlin’s Blog

I’ve been privileged this week to take part in a national conference organised by the Right Start Foundation in Birmingham drawing attention to the needs of BME communities to have more effective prevention and treatment services. Right Start have done some amazing work, in particular helping Asian women with drug users in their families access support for the drug user and themselves and, really importantly, expressing their feelings, hopes and fears publicly. They’ve also been working to help young Muslim people express their concerns about and experience of drugs. You know, this is so important and I felt humbled by the opportunity to take part.  Supporting these often ignored, not particularly politicised groups just to say in public how it is helps to change things - not immedately but drip by drip. In relation to young people, and particularly for communities which are challenged socially and economically and by prejudice, so much policy is created for them and done to them without properly engaging them in assessing what the problems are that the policy is intended to solve, devising and implementing the solution.

The front line work of engaging with communities - and not just the “usual suspects”  is so important. On the other extreme, I was depressed at various points in an international NGO meeting where I heard anti-drugs people condemning “harm reduction” and legalisers engage all over again in their sterile, unconstructive arguments. They are apparently diametrically opposed to each other, despite the fact that they all seem to acknowledge that all drugs can and do cause harm. I was told by one person that “a drug user cannot be a good mother”, by another that “prevention doesn’t work”. If only they’d listen to each other and to themselves they’d realise that this positioning doesn’t benefit anyone.  

It happens in the UK also. I sat through the ACMD public discussions about the classification of Cannabis and subsequently read a number of blogs which made me wonder if I had been sleeping throughout as these people had heard different things than I had. According to some blogs and journalists, the ACMD has apparently already decided about the classification of Cannabis, despite the fact that the Committee won’t report until the end of April. I thought that in the public session the Committee heard evidence; it certainly didn’t indicate in any way its likely decision. Nonetheless, these bloggers are either satisfied or angry already, depending on what they seem to have sussed the outcome, which apparently has already been decided, is and what they think about that. What a load of nonsense. 

The new Drugs Strategy comes out next week. Aside from the content, I hope that there will be a genuine - and funded - commitment to consulting with real people in communities and not just the campaigners with their intransigent attitudes and quite unsophisticated and unhelpful politicising of issues which affect real people’s lives.