Outrage in Cambridge!

[derek d j]

 True, Tomo..advisory councils may be getting rid of their scrientific advisers but  the pharmaceutical boys are untouchable.
 As any competent psychologist could have predicted, most reductees here are scoring more than the equivilant of their losses.  In times of bad brown, thy flirt with danger.  But if they tell the dsp they're simply warned that buying on top of a script is grounds for removing the script altogether.  So they do what most users do, get economical with the truth.
 Somebody asks about regulatory agencies, the custodians of the custodians.  They exist, sort of, but from bottom to top they're only as good as their individual minds and the information they receive.  Unless these individuals hang out with addicts, that information comes from the dsp.  Think how the above example will be reported.  With 'users' silenced, there's nothing on file to contradict dsp claims of 'success'.  Unchallenged, it'll satisy the DAAT, NTA and make it all the way up to 'fact' status.  It's unreal, it's scary and it's the way things work.
 Drug treatment has finalised its divorce from the drug problem and serves instead as a massive employment agency.  Users serve drug treatment.  Think about it.  If you've a coporate dsp, what do you get from them and what do they get from you?   Who are the 'users'?
 There were about 70 addicts in treatment in Cambridge in the '80's; now there are about 300.  Staff to 'help' them have increased 2000% and detox and rehab centres have entered the mix.  No higher percentage of users get clean,but that's neither here nor there - the priority of the dsp is the dsp.  Addicts are hardly encouraged into treatment and certainly discouraged out of it.  Statisics and language can be massaged to mean anything.  In a world of illusion, masters of lejeudemain are kings.
 Like NHS nurses, dsp footsoldiers rely on their employers to tell them what to do.  But what are they told, and who tells them?   Drug treatment services are no longer the preserve of the NHS but of competitive corportations battling to provide the best 'value for money'.  Consultants are factotums, following company policy.  Decisions are made by management, concerned with with finances, political winds and furture contracts up for tender. We've no idea what their opinions are, or whence they originate.  Addicts are an abstraction of figures and target, a uniform commodity, like tins of beans, not individuals or really people at all.  Only a fool tells a baked bean why he's eating it.
 How did it happen?  How did addict as crap,from whom only cowed deference is acceptable conduct, come to be dsp default setting?  Is understanding the addiction phenomneon really so difficult?  Or less profitable?
 Users are tempted to ride the bullshit to ease their passage.  I've fallen in with a bad crowd, I've defective genes, I've had a hard time, I've an illness.  Have I buggery.  I'm just colluding in horsehit and the deceit of conceit.
 If if its all about what to with troublesome rubbish, it's a thorny problem.  I've watched these people when they think they're on their own.  They talk very differently among themselves.  They call us 'clients' or 'punters' and think we're dopes who'll give them what they want. They're arrogant and rude.  They say they have to 'feed the mortgage' as if this explains mugging us.  They think they've a 'right' to a new car and a house on estates untouched by Le Corbusier.  They're a bit thick but not as much as they have you believe.  Their casuistry is tediously self centred - they wistfully talk of 'help'but lack intellectual resource to see beyond their solipsistic whims.  I blame bad art, multicultualism, a nanny state and cowardly intellectuals.  But what can one do?  It's not enough to dispense kindly advice or repair victims of their vicious turf wars - to paraphrase Burke, we do nothing.  These marauding drug treatment gangs have too long gone unchecked either by morality from within or sanction from without; soon they'll deteriorate beyond hope of redemption, like a bad Beaujolais.  
 The cannibals are at the gate.  The Age of Solution approaches.

[Flip]

Drug treatment has finalised its divorce from the drug problem and serves instead as a massive employment agency.  Users serve drug treatment.

Very well said!

Flip

[derek d j]

 The 2nd psychiatric opinions are due to review the case of the Cambridge injectables in a month.  The dsp now claims it would be dangerous to return our scripts as our tolerances are down.  Like most everything else they've done since  May, this manifests either woeful ignorance or a Canute-like attitude to addiction realities.  They seem to treat the affair like a game, a contest they are out to 'win'.  We losers have suffered nine months of drug treatment that screws you up.
 This time last year, I was blissfully unaware of drug treatment modalitiies, unable to tell a DAAT from an Orange Book.  I wish I still had my illusions.  The 'British System is in shreds, ripped apart by opiophobia, prejudice and a mammoth blindness.  Is that a drug epidemic I see tearing apart the community?  Shhh, I'm busy with my brochure enactment of dynamic solutions.
 It seems the point of treatment is now to get you out of treatment as soon as possible.  Now there's a few quid in it for the dsp to get 'clients' clean, the addict is expected to be a good egg and pack his jimjams for detox.  Paid champions insert themsleves into every stage of the 'recovery' process.  Family and friends are seriously encouraged to leave it to these faux-experts.  It's a grand idea to get users on the right track but mistaking abstinence for righteousness simply leads them into a cul-de-sac.  Take away the drugs alone and whatever caused the addiction will find expression elsewhere in the pantheon of human imperfection.
 There's no evidence this abundance of helpers changes anything.  The percentage that achieve ongoing abstinence via the detox/rehab/couselling route is just the same as for those who come off under their own steam.  This isn't surprising.  If it's possible for you to do something you really want to do, be it enlisting, getting abstinent or marrying your goat, you'll do it whatever.  If you can't, no amount of stick or carrot will make it happen.
 But scientific evidence reflects reality, and reality has been obscured or lost since job creation brought boomtime to the help industries.  If the addict is defined as idiot child or criminal nogoodnik, then others may be employed to watch them.  The CDT teams of the '80s were unsure what they were meant to do.  Out of the inglorious confusion came the effective privatisation of treatment and the arrival of the 'voluntary sector'.  Now keys and volunteers are trained to do what they're told - which involves loyalty to the corporation and helping it to get an edge on the competitition.  After 12 weeks of this education, any silly goose may claim the legitimacy of a health service professional.  When scrutiny is superficial, the kind of bully found from schoolyard to Kosovo may find a chance to exercise an influence on ' an inferior type'.  'Policy' from the top is affected by a variety of off-topic considerations.  With beautiful irony, it's the addict who's assumed to have a poor grasp of reality.
 Treatment is reduced a 'drugs are bad' simplicity.  Addicts, the doers of a bad thing, are less patients than parolees.  Their susceptibility inclines them to the path of least resistance.  Before long, they wonder if they'll 'pass' their urine analysis, not why they're pissing in a beaker in the first place.  The quickly learn their steps in the treatment  pas de deux, as 'problem' with which the dsp affects to help.  In exchange, they're given a methadone linctus habit , and then encouraged to kick.  70% top up with brown heroin, which confuses everything further.  A sizeable minority of UK citizens are clumisily self-medicating in search of an elusive pleasure principle but it remains unspeakable heresy to consider narcotherapy might benefit the troubled mind.   The real causes and effects of heroin use are as if unfit for human consumption.
 A competitive corporate culture adds to the mess.  'Charity' associations allow PR men to sentimentalise a good earner as a good thing.  Substance is trivilaised into feelgood fables and cosy Oxfamisms like '95p of every £1 you give goes directly on the service user'.  What on earth does that mean?  300,000 of these black babies are scoring in the UK tonight and drug treatment poses agency models as addicts and keys to illustrate syrupy stories of junkies recovered from the gutter?  This hoax is in poor taste.
 Corporate thinking and non-understanding of opiate addiction reached its logical conclusion last May in Cambridge.  The dsp lost money to bad banks and needed to cut costs.   It decided like ASDA to disontinue unprofitable lines.  That's us.   A hothpotch of unlicensed moral arbiters, readers of the political runes and wannabe social policemen may have influenced the selection.   To get over pesky medical considerations,they  somehow to 'help' us.  We've no input; we're presented with clinical decisions as faits accomplis - 'the team' has already decided, in camera.  Whoever they are, the team has decided to treat perfectly fine, law-abiding citizens as if they're animated waste.  How did such bloody arrogance find licence?
 When drug treatment gave us a problem to help us with, it reduced itself to its own absurdity.  When it expects users to collaborate in their own dsposal, we can only hope someone with the power takes a good look at what's been did and what's still hid.

[physeptomaton]

derek, you speak like Theodore Dalrymple on the other side of the opiates debate.

[OP8S]

Even better I would say, I don't think Mr. Dalrymple has got such cutting wit in his writing !

[derek d j]

  I'm glad someone recognised the pastiche.  I'd gone ten years through the same grinder as y'all before Tony Daniels took the short-term consultancy here.  No nonsense guy, did it right.   I told mates it was like meeting myself if I'd stayed on the straight and narrow.
 I'd worried when I read 'Romantaciising Opiates' that his cats would stray to the wrong home.  I'd been waIting for Our Keynes and What's Left of Him but seems he's as chickenshit as me.     For some reason, the dsp assured me he's 'in Africa'.  Maybe they miss the reviews  There's been some weird shit going on in Cambridge.
 For 20 years I've been high on pure heroin, beyond city limits.  I am completely law abidiing.  I'm no user and I got clean long ago. Hey, I got civilised values, too.
 Interesting stuff, heroin.   Romantic.  You can handle the negation, sometimes.  Asuming you've done your positive thinking and had your Gaia experience, you're plugged in.   You last long enough you can hoover out the unnatural negations, have a lil social value, make a few lovers.  For all the biosocial drawbacks, heroin  adds a few angles to perception.    But you have to be careful what you reflectively engage, to avoid loose wires.  Something to do with the nature of mind.  Bit like FBI profilers not getting too close to serial killers.
 We are not men who stare at goats.   We are fragile people of sound ecological mind and no ambition  We mind our own and don't allow intruders.   We are chronic heroin addicts and none of us should be treated this way.
 Since the DAAT intervention Cambridge diamorphs have been put through shit none of us can get our heads around; if we were guniea pigs the RSPCA would be at the door.  There was absolutely no reason to take me off my script at all, and the way I was treated on a nasty chemotherapy is nothing short of disgrace.  I begged these dreadful people to return me to my 20 year dose,whatever they thought, till the Hep course was over - interferon knocks your immunity, and when simaltaneously the very psychology of your addiction is attacked  by the very peoplewho claim to treat you, it gets impossible.   I'd cleared my Hep C at 12 weeks but this was heavy, left me uninsulated with no off switch.    But they're the sort who take things personally, and if I was missing hep doses, so what, theirs was a more important help.    I couldn't get over it or across and I began to get  $10 afraid.   I was afraid that some incredible corporate morphia ignorance had landed us in a kind of Stamford experiment.   If it was what it was, this is one almighty fucking negation laid on us or else I was underestimating the interferon..When the consultant told me the problems that I'd had since he's reduced my diamorphine couldn't possibly be down to lack of a little diamorphine, I abandoned the Hep course after 21 suboptimally dosed weeks. of quite unnecessary torment.  It is as it is and I am as I am and I'd been howling it at them for months  - they took no notice of a word I said, from May to Christmas.
 These people know nothing of heroin.   They know nothing of me, of my world, of my kind, of my love, of my beauty - they would slash and burn the lot and not even notice.  Always junkies, always thieves.  No freedom no place, no place to hide nor more, even at the very bottom of the pile,, when the seemingly disposable are the playthings of wanton boys.  Why have they done this to us?  For the drugs? 
I hope I'm wrong, maybe it's just a touch of flu, but I suspect my Hep C is back.  If it is, I shall expect whoever is held responsible for this whole wretched business to ensure I get the best possible chance of getting rid of it a second time.   Proper reparation.  Cambridge diamorphs have all been hit hard wherever they showed sensitivity.  Somebody better investigate soon.

[derek d j]

 In answer to an email, I clarify the last post.  Yeah, it's true.  I'm the geezer wot Dalrymple wrote a smack script.  Not the sorta thing I'd usually mention but I'm up against one bad ego trip here.  20 years ago, Dalrymple/Daniels had a good head.  He was that treatment rarity, a guy who asked questions.  If he agreed, he'd help; if he didn't he'd explain, maybe ask you to define your terms.  Very down on Marx, if I recall.  Well read, informed, articulate, iconoclastic.  Liked a good feed but showed no inclination to eat me.
 I asked the dsp to return me to optimal dose to save the hep course on countless occasions.  Nobody ever asked me anything, the team decided alone, within their terms of what could and couldn't, and should and shouldn't be.  I'm just a junkie object who ought to be grateful and on whom they must assert their authority.  It was up to hepology if they wanted to punish me for insulting them.  Most unusually, the more advanced my perception, the more it turned against me.  These people are the problem, and that's just how it is,
 Come out the cupboard, Tony, $100 says you can't tell me where I'm wrong.  
 

[physeptomaton]

Yes I developed an unhealthy fascination with Dalrymple's writing too, I am actually writing a similar satirical thing about him, even the Guardian mocked him with their review of Spoilt Rotten.

20 years ago was just before he started working at Winson Green (I know a geezer who landed 9 months there on remand- for a conspiracy he had nothing to do with, importing brown from the flat place to top up weed money- and Judge Jowett who became a Lord J reminded the magistrates how wrong they were to remand him when he directed the jury to return a NG verdict)
That's when he had this reverse anagnorisis and stopped believing in psychiatry or medicine,which he confessed he never even wanted to go into- he did it out of respect for his father's wishes. He decided that most human problems are the result of "deliberate folly", alcoholism and drug addiction are not diseases, 99% of depressives are not really depressed but are "unhappy" because they choose not to live by 19th century strictures and it is "impossible" to be happy in the sex/drugs/rock & roll lifestyle, and anyone who disagrees is a solipsistic sentimentalist left-wing nemesis whose views are quite inconsistent with human experience. 

It's not just drugs he isn't fond of: crying in public, eating in public, single parenthood, divorce, modern art, rock music, rap music, Vernon God Little, Marxism, Freudianism, solipsism, and at least a thousand other things including any sex outside of marriage (I assume from his love of hypocrisy that a couple of fat French doctors indulging in cinq a sept in the privacy of a luxury hotel room wouldn't bother him. But if you're 14 and selling yourself in a back alley prepare for his fury.)

[derek d j]

 I dunno, Phyman, we gotta call it straight.  The great ideas that came out of the 60s were stolen, corporate repackaged and sold as watered down, refined imitation.   Solutions were co-opted to serve the problem by people who served the problem; the originals, the 'I's of the ideas, died in gaol, blew out or vanished; the problem people, controlling the information, revised history to suit what they think are 'their' interests.  Theirs is the delusion of vanity, of 'ego'.  They turned sexual freedom into teens up the duff, cool into political correctness and designer jeans,LSD into ketamine, friendly neighbourhood dealers into organised crime and Hendrix into Boyzone.   All's turned to shit.  Nobody thinks, love is for snatched moments out of work hours.  We've been sold a state of mind where we think this is how it is, how things really are - you need 'money' to 'live', a 'job'.   Compassion is Elton John singing 'England's Rose'.   Modern art is making corporation man think a pile of bricks or a cum-shot is worth $100000K.  The shock is nobody asks why corp man is dumb enough to believe it.
 If I'm honest, there's little Tony's written I haven't thought at times myself.  It's what he doesn't go into that's interesting.  Corporation man reads Dalrymple as self-validification, like everything else.  His words are co-opted to serve the oppressors, to 'blame', to maintain their control.  Really, their control is the problem. Tony probably realises this, wonders he hasn't somehow taken 30 pieces of silver.
They've stolen language, and make the concept fit their rewrite.  'High' becomes agitated or disturbed.  'Users' are not 'clean' - there are a thousand examples in 'drug' 'news' alone.  They despoil nature and think they improve it - look at Trump in Scotland.   Those who serve to show how things really work are killed wherever spotted.  They don't do it deliberately, with primitive weapons - the un-sub-conscious implementation of the 'death-force' is part of how things really work, corruption is contagious. Bob Marley blew away the Harlem Appollo, Whiteman got nervous, Bob went down with 'cancer'.  The way it works.    I've felt it here, personally.   These arseholes thought to 'win' a game by denying me my script - my immunisation.  Me and my delicate ecology reflected their hearts of darkness when 'I' was interfearon-exposed, and the negation did the rest.  I can't explain, can't change it. nobody can.   Big joke.  Wish people could wake up and see.
Which returns us nieatly to 'the point'.  Here in Cambridge, utopian lives have been damaged, even destroyed by the dystopian masquerade of drug treatment 'help',   It's the same phenomenon that's killed addicts for decades and probably affects your own reflective habits.  Uusally, it's under 20 piles of distraction; here, it's a little more obvious,  If we can see how it operates, you'd think somebody 'in charge' will, and do something about it. Pour sauver les autres, as Tony might write.   Wouldn't you?.      

[physeptomaton]

Romancing Opiates was a book of absolute lies on pharmacological issues. But he was right that treating addiction is a bureaucracy.

He was VERY down on Marx and any form of non-capitalism ("I can provide my patients with a satisfactory refutation of Marxian epistemology"- Fool or Physician; "socialism is evil, inhuman and ultimately uncaring"- passim) But he is even more down on Marks- the best addiction doctor the UK ever had. Dr John would not only prescribe what you're on but crystal meth amps, freebase cocaine reefers, and Seconal or Tuinal to known injectors.
Shame he had to move to South Africa and prescribe his wellconal there. Same pill- pink, marked wellcome F3A. Just a different brand.

[Mark Gilman]

I think it was New Zealand that Dr Marks went to

[derek d j]

But he is even more down on Marks- the best addiction doctor the UK ever had. Dr John would not only prescribe what you're on but crystal meth amps, freebase cocaine reefers, and Seconal or Tuinal to known injectors.

 
 I'm on the Saffron Walden bus at the moment but let's not split hairs.   I'm a shameless skim reader.  What did my old croaker - I know he loves that word, told me when we was working the hole on the Piccadilly line - say about Dr Marks?  Have you a link/reference, Phyman?

[physeptomaton]

"working the hole on the Piccadilly line" What does that expression mean? The segregation unit at Pentonville? Never heard of it. I'm not sure if he mentions Marks by name but he says that the "legalisation experiment" in Liverpool failed and should not be repeated.

[derek d j]

"working the hole on the Piccadilly line" What does that expression mean? The segregation unit at Pentonville? Never heard of it. I'm not sure if he mentions Marks by name but he says that the "legalisation experiment" in Liverpool failed and should not be repeated.

Naw, its from the opening lines of one of Burrough's books ( Soft Machine? )- " I was working the hole with Sailor.. "   Robbing drunks on the New York subway.  Daniels-as-Dalrymple claims it shows a boastful addict morality - that Burroughs never worked that particular hole in his life, never needed nor wanted to rob drunks for their cash, that it's simply his artistic creation is a distinction I'd have thought Daniels would have appreciated.  But Dalrymple ain't real deep.  
 I sometimes can't believe he's not being strangely tongue-in-cheek, adopting a choleric-bumpkin alter persona to shake it all about.  I'm always wating for his solutions to what grates him, other than to take the money and run. Maybe he's writing his capodilavoro now, in French.   There's a curious nervous laugh and a way of looking at the room apparent in the you-tube videos (Anthony Daniels..Romanticisng Opiates..May 2006) that makes me wonder.   And you have to remember he gave me a script for all the right reasons, he knew I'm very anti-elitist.  You can see his face then if you chisel off the fat and darken the hair.   He took some fair risk to aid the ANC in apartheid South Africa and behaved honorably under pressure in a number of African trouble spots. Does this then very anti-Nazi really now advocate no-sex-outside-marriage or a return to Victorian repressions?   Maybe Winston Green, changed him - I read a piece where he described coming in after the Twin Towers to face Ronnie Easterhouse on hunger strike and the rest of the 'hospital patients', must've been an odd vocation.  Shame there's no example of the Dalrympilian vitriol he pours on spectral Bill to learn me all about Dr Marks.  Does he elaborate on why the 'experiment' was a failure?   What, Phyman or anyone, do you think he'd have to say about what's happening here in his old manor?

[physeptomaton]

Daniels has been to most ex-communist and totalitarian regimes in the world and broken apartheid, their immigration laws and other unjust law such as bans on Shakespeare books or in some cases any printed matter at all. (He must be a candidate for one of the black 10 million air-miles cards in that George Clooney film). He's even been arrested and locked up in one former communist state. Yet he draws a strict line between liberty and what he considers "libertinism"- he writes against ID cards, excessive CCTV, child databases, and even the smoking ban- he said the argument that poor young ladies who work in pubs might have no choice where to work is insufficient to justify it.

His argument on sex is "twofold, the philosophical and the pragmatic." (from his anti drugs magnum opus) Philosophically he says that mankind's way of achieving transcendence and being more than mere animals is to restrain animalistic functions by personal discipline and social convention. He argues that chastity is useful as a "civilizer of human relations". To him, acting on passion without the other two legs of Sternberg's love tripod (intimacy- which he says only comes through public reticence and confidentiality, and commitment of which marriage is an outward and visible sign) is a sort of treason against civilisation. He does accept limited exceptions to that- see below, provided they are not publicly gloated of (or better still not publicly mentioned at all).

Pragmatically, he says that the result of a sexual free-for-all is precocious children who never grow up properly and become jaded by their thirties, a lack of self-control which pervades all life, more jealousy, more rape and other violence against women, disease, crime and general barbarism.  Although Dalrymple denies that God even exists, the argument was made by many Christians in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20th century, where some (eg Southern Baptists) wanted to stick strictly to the literal interpretation of the Bible and others believed that the rules on sex, drunkenness, etc. were intended only for that first-century Jewish/ Hellenistic culture and could be relaxed. They pointed to the earthly consequences of what was often called "incontinence" to promote the more rigid view.

As far as hypocrisy is concerned, he claims that hypocrisy is better than open exhibitionism because it "at least recognises there is a difference between right and wrong". I'm surprised that a psychiatrist would believe that doing a wrong in full knowledge of its moral reprehensibility us not as serious as being misguided or apathetic to ethical questions in the first instance. He seems to think that the black-plumed Victorians with their public gentility and private self-indulgence (including la vice anlglaise which he has discussed in numerous contexts of only tangential relevance) had the right balance between accepting the imperfectibility of man and the need to aim for virtue. In Sex & The Shakespeare Reader, he defends the "militant" protection of chastity against an indecent proposal but also says that the service of prostitutes is "fine as a safety valve" , ie it is more appropriate for a lonely man to discreetly purchase "services" in a brothel than to abstain until his sexual inexperience causes him severe distress and possibly caused perversion to develop.