The participation of GPs and, by inference, chemists in the maintenance programme for recovering addicts is a vital component in the provision of support to drug users who want to kick the drug habit, but urgent action is required when that service appears not to ease but to spread the problem.
I became aware of a number of cases in my constituency but one, in particular, that has got out of hand. It concerns a chemist, Boles, in the Inchicore area, which has received a good deal of media attention during the week. It appears that recovering addicts are travelling miles to that chemist to get their physeptone and methadone. Residents in the area claim that on numerous occasions they saw addicts come out of the chemist with litre bottles of methadone and pass it around. They also claim that what was a very peaceful main street has now become a no go area and they are fearful for their safety.
I brought this to the attention of the health board and the Garda, but that is simply fire brigade action. What is required is the type of safeguards I presume the report will recommend. When I became aware of the position in Inchicore and in another part of Ballyfermot I wrote to the Eastern Health Board and the reply I received from its programme manager states:
The Eastern Health Board is concerned at certain aspects of methadone prescribing in the region at the moment and these concerns were brought to the attention of the Department of Health following a lengthy debate on the issue at the November 1996 meeting of our Board. A group has been sitting in the Dept of Health comprising representatives of the Dept of Health, Eastern Health Board, the Irish College of General Practitioners and the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland with a brief to produce guidelines on the prescribing and dispensing of methadone that will enable badly needed services to happen in a safe and effective manner. I have been a member of that group myself and our work is just completed. My understanding is that the report is being brought to the attention of the new Minister for Health.
I support the programme manager's recommendation that the dispensing of methadone should be done in a safe and effective manner, but that is not what is happening. Under the methadone maintenance programme in the nearby Aisling clinic in the Ballyfermot area, if an addict cannot prove by way of a regular urine test that he or she is still not using drugs, the health board will refuse to dispense methadone or physeptone. I commend the health board and the staff of the Aisling Centre for their work.
Drug addicts have asked me to request the staff to allow them back on the programme when they have been found to have taken drugs again. I fail to see how we can support such stringent controls, which is the correct way to run maintenance programmes, and at the same time allow GPs who are not part of the health board scheme to prescribe in excess of one litre of physeptone or methadone. It is inconceivable that anyone who receives that amount of methadone or physeptone will not either sell it to buy hard drugs or, as happened to a young man who was a good friend of mine, accidentally kill himself. Unless the scheme gains credibility in the community, as had started to happen in some areas where those not involved in drugs were prepared to accept community based programmes for local addicts, and unless we can introduce controls which apply to the Aisling Centre in Ballyfermot to the GPs and pharmacists operating outside the scheme, we will not have any community based programmes. More crucially, I fear the drugs problem is being spread on a wholesale basis and I fear for the lives of those taking more than the required amount of methadone or taking it for the first time.
