Waiting List for Life or Death

Students for Sensible Drug Policy Conference in DCU

My name is Grace Dyas, For the last six years, starting with a performance I made about the social history of heroin in Ireland from the 1960s up to the present day, I have been working with addicts through art. Drug users. People in addiction. Notice the subtle, the micro differences in those terms.

I have become invested in how drugs are impacting our society and I have centred alot of my activism around that. I have appeared on RTE, on Radio and in the Irish Times, speaking out about how badly drug users are being treated in our society.

We, as those engaged in the drugs issue,  spend a lot of time talking about policy, government investment, international policy, the war on drugs, the war on the war on drugs, the big picture, shifting hearts and minds, sea change.

I’m predicting that that is what a lot of the esteemed speakers here will be discussing. The macro.  I want to talk about something else. What you might call the micro. How these things actually affect the people I have worked with. ‘On the ground’ Day to day.

We can talk about legalisation in broad strokes. Yes take the money off the bad guys. The drug dealers. The cartels. Invest it in rehabiliation. Everything would work out then in the end. We all know its more complex than that.

I like many of you have agonised over what position to take on the legal status of drugs. I think the Portugese model would work best here, and I launched a petition to decriminalise the drug user this time last year, with Rachel Keogh, who many of you might know of her book ‘Dying to Survive’

This part is important.
Wait for it.

The are more urgent, more crisis, more life and death matters, when it comes to drug users in this country than the legal status of drugs. In a way, what I have learnt this year, is that the legal status of drugs doesn’t actually mean anything. I’ll explain why.

For me, addiction is about a simple thing, that many of those in addiction services would vehemently reject.

It is about feelings.

We take drugs because of how we feel.

We take drugs because we don’t feel loved, because we are afraid, because we want to take a risk and because we don’t care what happens to us and we want everyone to know.

Over the course of making and touring the play ‘HEROIN’ I have met and interviewed thousands of heroin addicts, in Ireland and abroad, and each one of those people has disclosed to me that they were sexually abused. The two go hand in hand. There is a direct link, in my view, between the incarcaration of hundreds of thousands of inner city youths in Daingean and Letterfrack in the 1960s, and the heroin epidemic which kicked off in 1978/1979. Heroin is the strongest pain killer you can get. Sexual abuse is the most painful thing a person can suffer. In a bizzarre distorted way it makes a calming kind of sense.

We have to deal with the feelings first. For many people involved in the drug problem with problem drug use, drugs are not the problem! They are the solution.

Our state has failed and abused a large portion of the population for the last one hundred years. Housing people in ghettos, Economic Deprivation, No access to education, allowing the church to psychologically physically and sexually abuse them, all of those things happened to a huge section of our society. For those people, drugs were and are the only solution.

But lets leave the context to one side for a second and lets talk about today.

I want you to picture that I am a drug user living in Dublin today.

I have 2 children. My partner is also a drug user. Traditionally heroin was my drug of choice and now its crack cocaine. Heroin is like sweets compared to this stuff. My parents are alcoholics. The housing estate I grew up in had such a bad name in the media that I was ashamed to be from there, I grew up knowing I couldn’t write my address on my CV.

In school, I was looking for attention because I got no attention at home from my parents, because I wasn’t a bottle of whiskey, I was a child. I was disruptive. I acted up. I was hit sometimes even though it wasn’t legal, but mostly I was ignored.

At the age of 11 I was abused by a friend of my fathers. Shortly after I started to drink alchohol, take prescription drugs, and smoke weed. Then I started to take Ecstacy. I injected heroin at the age of 14, having been already homeless for a year. I started to prostitute myself.  I made more money because the men wanted young flesh. It wasn’t hard for me to do that because of the abuse I suffered as a child. It felt like that line had already been crossed.  I stopped crying. I started to depersonalise. This is not happening to me, its happening to somebody else. I started on a clinic, only to reduce the amount of men I needed to be raped by a day. I waited three months to get on aclinic. Now with the physeptone, I can do a bit less and not be sick.

Today I am 22. I am on methadone, and as many benzo’s as you can name. I can get as many tablets as I want from my doctor, and as much methadone. I am not allowed to reduce my dose, it’s too dangerous, what if I use? I am supervised as I drink it.  My two kids are below school age. They have seen me injecting heroin. They have seen me smoking crack cocaine. They have seen me with men who have paid me for sex. The social services are aware of this and they don’t see a problem.

(this is a direct quote from a social worker) “Sure if we removed all the kids in Dublin from their parents who are using drugs- we’d have nothing to do!”

I want to stop taking drugs. I am afraid to stop taking drugs because if I do that I will have to feel all the feelings I haven’t felt since I was 11. I know that drugs are killing me. After a series of incidents that have made me recognse, through the drugs, that I want to stop and having achieved the bravery required. I have come to the decision that I want to stop.

In order to go into a treatment centre, where I would do therapy and try to develop skills for how to live with the past, how to live without drugs and how to live in the real world, I need a period of hospitalisation, I need to be medically supervised to detox my body from the lethal combination of chemicals I rely on each day to survive. I am on a waiting list for detox. I could be waiting up to six months. I don’t know if I will make it. I can’t get into treatment without it. Everyday is a massive battle. So in one week from now I will slip again. I’ll give up. I’ll keep taking drugs. I don’t want to be taking drugs. I need help.

My name is Grace Dyas and I am an activist.

I want to say that there are 30 detox beds in this country. I have been saying that for five years. I cry about it every day. Basically what happens is someone presents with a life or death illness and our health service tells them to go on a waiting list. There should be no waiting list. We need emergency detox facilities available. The rosie Report published last year said “ALL TREATMENT WORKS” The Redmond Report (2012) said that community, drugs and youth where the sectors most badly affected by austerity. The reality is that this is class warfare. No politician will ever campaign on opening another 30 detox beds in the next election, but think of the lifes that would save. 350 people overdosed last year. If the woman in the example I gave had 18,500 euro, or access to 18,500 she could go into detox overnight. The state is choosing not to invest in these services.

I don’t believe they don’t have the money. I believe the don’t have political will because there is no votes in it. We had to the money to bail out the banks.

We have accepted the idea of a waiting list for an essential life or death service, the same way we accepted abject poverty, and abuse, because we feel less than. We can choose to say no that. We can build a republic where anyone who needs help can access it. What a simple idea. Its not too much to ask for.

I have met thousands of people like the woman I described. I believe that when a drug user comes to the crippling devastating decision to stop using drugs, when they choose life instead of death, when they make that brave leap, they should be offered every service available, we should go above and beyond to help them, because at the end of the day, we as a society have our part to play too. You could argue that that could be our redress, for the miserable lives people in parts of our communities have had to endure at the hands of the state.

This problem wouldn’t go away if drugs were legal. Drug use is about crisis, it’s about risks, its about passive suicide. A lot of the people taking drugs want to die. They are not gonna be interested in a safe legally regulated high. The drug talk you hear in clinics is all about what combination of dangerous ‘polydruguse’ can get you more out of your bin than the next. Drug users don’t care about the law. And drug dealers capitolise on it. Sure yeah you take that legal stuff, but what about this cheaper more potent stuff, theres no way they would legalise this shit, here have a free hit. Thats how I think it would go. It’s all about how to avoid feeling your feelings. We need to give people the resources to be able to feel their feelings in a safe way. And we are not doing that. We are not making treatment a  real option. We are not making rehabilitation a real option. We need to focus on that.

The war on drugs has failed. It has made a holy mess of people. But the factors of that the debris, is real human collatoral damage. So I would appeal to you, try and look at the individual the day to day, as well as the bigger picture. You could be saving someones life.