My Drugs Hell

May 23, 2003 9:31 AM

Elliott could no longer bear the waste. He had six staff and a budget of £3.5m a year. He had a potential client group of 25,000 users ... but at the end of all his work and all that public money, the total number of detox beds he was able to provide was five. The Guardian reports from the front-line of the drugs war. (part two) You may have no interest in Drugs or the UK but read this superb piece for a profile of a bureaucracy in farcical, tragic, total collapse.
posted by grahamwell (5 comments total)

a bureaucracy in farcical, tragic, total collapse.

i'll pass. i'm already living that every day at work.
posted by quonsar at 9:58 AM on May 23, 2003

Me too! Good article though.
posted by insomnyuk at 12:25 PM on May 23, 2003

Nick Davies did a similarly compelling case about another area that Btitish govt. policy is failing in, last year (I think it was).

The treatment model, which worked till about 1971, kept our addict numbers down to the low thousands - who were regularly seen by medical services , and crime was also relatively low: now we have hundreds of thousands of desperate and unhealthy addicts, and the gangsters are winning an increasingly brutal war against the majority population.

On so many fronts, things need to change: soon, radically and justly.
posted by dash_slot- at 2:24 PM on May 23, 2003

its just a fucking shame really.
the americans have their shit together on this one a lot more than us.
its a fact that rehab works better than anything else , so why not use it ?
instead money gets put into agencies like the council on alcohol ....whose vice president died a performing alcoholic without a day off the sauce.
and anyone commiting an offence while under the influence of an addiction should have their records wiped as soon as they reach a period of clean time as well.
posted by sgt.serenity at 6:38 PM on May 23, 2003

It's unfortunately illustrative of so much of current government culture in the UK. Ask any head teacher, probation officer, health service manager or senior policemean about the arcane and convoluted reporting they must deliver in abundance to their Whitehall masters, rather than spend time doing their jobs.
posted by normy at 6:58 PM on May 23, 2003