Bernard West was 14 the first time he experimented with drugs. It was the late 1990s, and the prevalence of heroin was exploding in his community in south inner city Dublin. “I became addicted to heroin at the age of 16.”
“I became addicted to heroin at the age of 16. My father passed away so it was a coping mechanism around that loss,” he says, now aged 46.
During the work of the assembly to date, services have reported increasing demand for treatment, increased complexity of addiction, and a need for multidisciplinary and wraparound services to tackle not only the addiction, but also the reasons behind that dependence. “At the time, I still had my appearance and how I carried myself. I would’ve been very skinny and would’ve been on and off methadone. It would have been hard to maintain, there would have been a lot of lying and deceiving, a lot of criminality,” he says.
According to Anita Harris, interim director of services at Coolmine, addiction in prisons is a much bigger issue than is currently acknowledged. “People from prison just cannot get into treatment,” she says. “There is no data around drug addiction in prisons. We know it’s a big problem. There is addiction counselling provided but that’s only one type [of treatment].”‘We were educated to be ashamed’: Dublin GAA player Philly McMahon tells Citizens’ Assembly about his late brother’s heroin addictionFor West, prison was almost like the treatment centres he previously attended. He used the routine and stability it provided to his advantage.
Harris says the Covid-19 pandemic created a “monster” in terms of addiction. The pandemic is over, she says, but the consequences of it remain and are more prevalent than many realise. Construction workers, in particular, are increasingly presenting to Coolmine’s services seeking help, Harris says. Many of them afterwards feel the need to leave the trade to remain in recovery, due to the availability of drugs and alcohol for those in the sector.
“I ended up being homeless, on the streets, injecting crack cocaine, I ended up with hepatitis C. My sister found me in a laneway; I didn’t want to be found. I couldn’t [die by] suicide. I didn’t want to go home when my sister found me. I told her to go away and that I was a waste of people’s time. People tried to help me and I told them to leave me alone,” he explains.
Despite that desire to recover, returning to Coolmine wasn’t easy. “It was very very hard coming back this time. Because of embarrassment, feeling I’d let people down, it was all internal stuff.”As part of Coolmine’s treatment programme, individuals are encouraged to be self-sufficient and to be part of something bigger.
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