Outrage in Cambridge!

[simon]

Well my MP's seat might be up for graps if he's sentenced to more than 6 months for the money he took that he thought he was entitled to. I'm really pleased he can hang onto his job if his sentence is less.

Keep writing to your MP's - make sure you write though as they have a duty to reply, don't e mail.

[OP8S]

I'll contribute £20 towards your candicacy simon...that's £25 so far between me & Derek. LOL! Though maybe there might be somebody that uses the site that is prepared to put their own name forward? A GP or Pharmacist that believes in the positive benefits of substitute prescribing & has information based on fact & not the tripe that is more often than not communicated by the press. If it wasn't for the fact that when you google my name there only appears to be 1 other person in the U.K that has the same name I would be prepared to do it myself in a different region to the one that I live in. Think I will send Howard Marks an email anyway, though with the release of his film Mr Nice he would probably worry about the effect it has on his box office takings!

[simon]

I'll happily be the Alliance MP but I want a shiny Maserati and a duck pond and a new suit and some brylcream. I can do an out-reach cllinic for all the alcoholic members of the house of lords and get Boots to open a Librium dispensary somewhere out of the way. Now how do I sign up?

[OP8S]

I'll get the Brylcream...I'll even dig your duck pond ( though I want the expensise that you claim for it! )
Before anything is said I know that this is an extremely important thread, but a couple of light hearted posts will do it no harm.
What I posted before is possible, but who is going to be the person to stick their head above the prohabisionist's parapet?

[derek d j]

 Stick your head above the prohibitionists' parapet and they'll try to blow it off your shoulders..and insist its for your own good.
 Cambridge 'injectable' users adjust.  There'll be no further 'reductions' till the 2nd psychiatrists give their opinions but nobody's getting their original scripts back either.  With 14 now 'complaining', funding and logistical problems mean it'll be a while yet.  We're grateful for those sane souls putting the whole thing together despite all the obstacles. There's been some abolitionist crowing that '2nd opinions' will lead at best to 'further discussion' and 10 users were allegedly 'very happy' to lose their script, which clearly 'proves' enforced disintoxification works on everybody.   Complainants fear anything they say will be used against them and keep stum; many are walking evidence of the counter-productivity of 'fear-based education' and are now taking far more dope than is needed to make up the shortfall in their scripts.  Least said.
 Oldtimers back on the street are surprised at how easily and cheaply they can 'score' here nowadays - both 'brown' and 'crack' only became locally available a decade after most cities.   Since the 'harm preventionists' arrived we've coincidentally caught up with the rest of the country.  It's good to see progress.
 We can't accept clinicians who actually follow research and guidelines are a historical curiosity, nor that 'drug treatment' can be separate from 'the drug problem'.  We hope the government doesn't, either.  Ghettoization doesn't work and sanctioned addict bashing won't distract the lazzorini for ever.  Addiction hits anyone, anywhere and weakness is no legal reason to deny human or patient rights.  Treatment shouldn't be be in the hands of carpetbagging charlatans who assist hundreds into abstinence and toss hundreds of thousands onto the junkheap.  Endless layers of 'rehab' are the new solution only for their owners cash worries.  Innovative ideas are required and the victims of dogma nationwide cannot be bewildered into silence much longer.  How many users in your town stay clear of 'treatment'?  How'd your dsp react if they all walked in and demanded the 'help' they want'?
As always, we hope for reason, love our friends and pray for our enemies.

[sapphire]

Oh Derek,I can't believe this hasn't been resolved yet (well knowing the drug treatment policies in the UK I can) but YKWIM.

I wrote to my Lib Dem mp about it and the LIB Dem health minister about this subject - no reply from either although emails got through and have been read!

Keep up the good fight.

Love Sapphire

[KikiMarooni]

... "we’ve set out a bold vision for the future of the NHS - rooted in the coalition’s
core beliefs of freedom, fairness and responsibility" ...

... "We will make the NHS more accountable to patients" ...

...."patients will be at the heart of everything we do. So they will have more choice and control,
Patients will be in charge of making decisions about their care" ...

..."there will be a relentless focus on clinical outcomes. Success will be measured,
not through bureaucratic process targets, but against results that really matter to patients" ...

David Cameron - Prime Minister / Nick Clegg - Deputy Prime Minister / Andrew Lansley - Secretary of State for Health - Equity and excellence: Liberating the NHS July 2010

I must be missing something here ......

Now now Skunk, you're forgetting that 'users' don't count as 'people' OR 'patients' - duh!

And yeah, I couldn't agree more - there is a veil of fear between drug services and their so called clients. The power services hold over the client's wellbeing is unparallelled, and every client is only too aware of how a slip of the tongue can be twisted and 'reported' and 'recorded' into anything 'they' want to prove. I wonder how many other conditions there are in which the trip to the doc is filled with fear not for the outcome, but for the precarious dance that will lead to the outcome.

My thoughts are with you guys

[sapphire]

I did not know that MP's just did not reply to emails as a rule so I have now sent letters to Nick Clegg,my local Lib Dem and the Lib Dem Dept. of Health MP.

Don't know if it'll do any good but one of the guys I wrote to is all in favour of more funding to drug services and it being all about individual not blanket treatment, if any of themreply I'll let youknow what they said!!

[derek d j]

 I've posted about this affair in general terms; really, there's no "we", just as disparate a group of individuals as you'll find anywhere, in the cold November rain I think personally.
 I thought about a SWIM when I began posting- what was appropriate?  Kafka? - nobody reads him and the mads translate it as 'paranoid'.  Superjew?  Doubt many peops are familiar with old Lenny Bruce riffs and it'd translate as paranoid with racial confusion/delusions of grandeur.  In the end, I just left half my email address- I'd nothing to hide so it shouldn't be a problem.  Uh huh.
I turned 60 last week, in the 17th week of Hep C chemotherapy on a reduced script.  The dsp figures one is nothing to with the other and that's that.   At first, I thought it simply a misunderstanding but should've known that DOH guidelines would count for as much as those for drug treatment.  The more I read the more it depressed me .  The history of drug treatment is a sad reflection of just about everything else since the 60s, and especially after Thatcher decided to demolish the last vestiges of 'we are the people' and turn the spectred isle into a two tier society, or service economy.  As encountering other 'complainants' serves to reflect a kind of psychological torment and seems to hit upon addiction's 'secrets' - dont dem mystics say we're all reflective surfaces of one another?    You might say I'm not impressed by the 'new' ways of thinking offere by my dsp.  Even this much hailed 'cognitive behaviour therapy' is no more than R.D. Laing recobbled for corporate man - the 'in the widest sense' bit of 'cognition' becomes knowing how to work for Tescos.  But 'work' has a dictionary definition, too, and its nothing about doing big jobbies or little jobbies for any corporate organisation.  Dr Laing fell from grace when he told a convention of psychiatrists they'd never cure their patients till they realised they were mad themselves.  I tried to open up that one, but with similar success.  I was told I'd 'insulted' the consultant and he was withiin his rights to cut me off cold - but he'd let the business manager decide.  The manager seemed a decent chap but the experience knocked the bejaysus out of me.    Since then, it's got meaner; no way am I getting my script back for the duration of Hep treatment.  If I explain I'm having difficulties I'm offered more 'help' -  someone who took a counselling course to get a 'job' and 'help drug addicts' and more 'monitoring'; if I don't. I'm showing no signs of withdrawal and am fine.  The hep stuff messes with your mood and  I can barely string a sentence together.  I start to think about this mystery virus that atttacks livers, and how the life promised by the industrial revolution - of leisure, art, literature, music and  human fulfilment- became leisure centres, bingo, Hello magazine the X factor and 'owning things'.  My mamma was the first of her line in five generations not to live and die in the shadows of t'mill and I used this to try to introduce dialogue on 'the causes of my addiction'; they wonder if she was shooting up when she changed my nappies.  I have no option but to 'tweak' my Hep meds to arrest what you could call a profound depression; that, unlike 'reduction' is my choice.  Any user who's been through iHep treatment can understand how reducing the most effective painkiller and anti-depressant in the world might affect me but the dsp refuses 'to help shorten my life'.  Time kept passing and I kept vomiting and my teeth crumbled and I wasn't sure it was interferon delusion that 'they' were trying to force their dirty thinking onto me.. or everybody wants to help and is as honest as they can be  I couldn't separate, Hep meds 'side-effects', narcotic shortfall or stress from what can feel like psychological vivisection- after a while it didn't seem to matter much, understanding is no help, which is weird in itself. I'm no good to anyone or for anything like this and just wanted to crawl into bed and hide. I'd''ve left my birthday uncelebrated if somebody hadn't intervened,.  Nobody is to blame, everybody's ' only following orders'    Nobody can claim my life wasn't legal, responsible, moral  and honest and actually dandy, or tell me what I really did wrong. It  seems at root to not much to do with 'drugs treatment' and everything to do with a belief system.  I don't sleep much and wonder how what sort of mind can perceive any of this as 'helping' me - when jolly Boris starts stuttering about 'ethnic cleansing', I grow more convinced it is indeed all in the miind.  I'm made of strong stuff and hope my sense of humour's back soon.  We'll see where it goes.  Sorry for moaning.   Everyone has problems and some know it.  Thanks Sapphire, Kiki and lovers everywhere.

[sapphire]

(((((HUG))))) You are not moaning, were I in your situation I would be apoplectic by now and probably in the local padded cell ward!

I really feel so badly for you,I know the situations do not compare but when my CDT doc was going to reduce me quicker because of some imagined heart problem I was depressed, obsessive and just angry so I cannot even begin to know how you feel.

If I can do anything for you let me know,or if you just want to bend someone's ear, feel free, mine are very bendy.

Love Sapphire

[derek d j]

  My OAP neighour's been quiet of late.  I saw him last month, catching the last sun in his bamboo garden, reading ' Colossus of Maroussi', lost to the world.  " How you feel?" I asked. " With my fingers, usually, " he said, not looking up. " F*** off if you're going to be an arsehole."  Last time i called, he was on the throne.  " Having a Blair?"  I enquired.  " You're behind the times," he called, " I'm practising my concentrated movement therapy."
 Anyway, he let himself into mine this morning.  "C'mon," he said and tossed me my coat.  I saw he'd fished out his old service beret and recalled the date.  "I'm a sick man," I protested, but followed him out onto the ringroad.  He pressed the button on the pedestrian crossing and halted, head bowed, halfway across the zebra as the church bells tolled eleven.  The lights changed and traffic built up.  " F***ing move!" shouted a van driver.  My neighbour flashed a crisp military salute and stood motionless.  " Our boys " I mouthed and the van driver shut up.  The minute of remembrance passed.  Some motorists  smiled as they drove on, some didn't.  " Where's yer poppy, then ?" shouted one.  " Inside." said my neighbour.  On the way home, he said the Chinese chippie thought wearing the poppy was something to do with the Opium Wars.
 His last bit of 'street theatre' involved offering £5 notes to office workers leaving an insurance company.  The police took him downtown to 'prove' it was '' his money."  "Are you some sort of nutter, sir?" asked the sergeant.  My neighbour pointed at a constable struggling with the access code to open the bombproof security doors leading to the cells.  " Depends how you look at it," he said, and they let him go.
The dsp laugh when I tell them they can learn from 'clients' like this.  There again, if I tell some people I love the guy, they figure I fiddle with his winkle.
 Another 'suspended reductee' visited last night.  He's HCV but says he's 'only' drinking three cans of 'kestrel' a day, leastways when he can get enough valium.  He'd called to cheer me up and to ask if I knew why all the brown in town was rubbish.  He insisted I take half his toacco when I complained he'd missed the toilet bowl by a foot..
 Happy Remembrance Day, everybody.  Peace will come, lest we forget.

[derek d j]

  Sorry, I made a mistake there - it wasn't my neighbour but his then 'little chickie' who was taken to the police station after the " free fivers" stunt.  I don't mean to paint my neighbour as any kind of sage.  Most of the time he's a miserable old git, less Diogenes than Diogenes Syndrome.  He only differs from my other addict caller in that he knows himself - and heroin - better and is more at ease with why he doesn't belong..and they're only remotely like one another or me in that we're all 'durg addicts' and that's suddenly been determined as our identity.
 If the Big Society decides to handle its displaced persons by displacing them further, God help us when they move on to the welfare-maintained.  The folk at the dsp of course have good hearts really; they're too in an impossible position, also victims of a chronic, massive understanding meltdown beyond all our personal problems.   Addiction is a challenging, exciting field.  Maybe the 'key' to improving drug treatment is essentially the same as to improving life on the estates.  Maybe, as my neighbour says, there's a reason old service survivors remember all the war dead.   I don't know.  I know nothing, except all lives are valuable.  I'm just grateful my liver's right, and for the beautiful people who saved my birthday.  I'd better shut up now till we know where this is going.

[derek d j]

 'Les injectables' of Cambridge remain in unromantic limbo.  The logistics of 2nd psychiatritic opinions are apparently close to resolution.  'Users' are told nothing and must rely on their own devices to figure out what monkey business is going on here.  Campanula wearies of wasting her sweetness on the desert wind and tends her flowers instead.  The poorly worry themslves into physical distress and the untogether deteriorate. We're mildly cheeed by Wednesday's news from Westminter but nothing changes here.
  It's an absurd situation.  The dsp would help with the problem it gave me by giving me more problems.  Everyone seems caring and sincere. Something doesn't quite compute.  Who makes the decisions, who's giving the orders that send everybody so nuts?   It's like asking for a word with Lloyd Bank
 Nobody dies directly from withdrawal, no more than from Hep C, but at 60 neither are likely to help prolong active life.  Even Mao-Tse-Tung had to turn a nelson eye on the aged opium habituee.  Nobody can deny I'm good value for my script, accuse me of anti-social behaviour or fault my lifestyle.  So why would 'the team' dangerously weaken my body or deny me the chance of any functional existence till I'm at least 64?  Why would they rebuff as personal affront all efforts to correct etiological myth?  I know they're worried about funding but it's a bit rum if they'd run me over to protect their mileage allowances.  Maybe it's an ego thing.
The cavemen who use their control of technology to sell prodigious earth-rape as 'success' appeal to the worst in people. They endeavour to befuddle the middle ground into believing underclass yobs are the cause of their discontent.  They encourage the personalisation of addiction as your least favourite yob.
 If you lay an unpalatable truth on the geezer down the pub or crackhouse, his ego translates it into personal insult to justify his beating the crap out of you.  His middle class equivilant is more subtle; lip the stressed jobsworth from the council and you slip down the housing list.   When he's part of a group. or the team, an organisation of decent, right thinking people, the individual can excuse his participation in all sorts of dubious behaviour he wouldn't countenance on his own.  If suspect enterprise is afforded state-sanctioned power to batter acquiescence, there's a danger to society, not just to the putz with the big mouth.  The old whore needs to be alert and its Dalrymples to pay attention.
 If John Lennon were resurrected today, he'd mock the sentimental bilge that marked his anniversary, and some offended soul would shoot him.  Assange is inside and the students are revolting. Everybody's learning, let's hope in time..

[Jimmy]

Hi Derick - sorry to hear you are still in limbo.

Regarding the new drug strategy: at least this unforseen rhetoric from right wing lips can now be used to relay the undisputable truth - that "medication assisted recovery can and does happen" and for some, such recovery will only be realized through the prescription of injectable drugs of choice.

I mean, if rank and file abstentionists are able to realize this fact, how dumb does that make those responsible for your predicament??

Regards
Jimmy

[Fluoro]

Out of all the countries in the world that use injectable diamorphine as a medicinal drug, it is by far the most expensive in this country. Not because it costs us anymore than say Germany 2 procure the drug,but because it is only licensed in as a freeze-dried formulation,an apparently expensive process. That is why when there was the drought a few years ago,it wasnt an option to import it from another diamorphine using nation.