News / A different approach to tackling drugs
WORKING with drug users rather than targeting them can help reduce the harm caused by illegal substances, a conference in Lerwick has heard.
Local health professionals heard from a German academic that a purely confrontational approach would drive the drugs scene underground and make it uncontrollable.
Professor Anke Stallwitz, who has been researching the Shetland heroin scene for the last ten years, said her research suggests that around 500 islanders were using the class A drug at its peak in 2004.
The conference comes at a time drug services in the isles are being redesigned in the wake of cuts to public funds.
Stallwitz first came to Shetland in 2000 when she conducted a number of interviews with local heroin users as part of the research for her honours degree from Caledonian University, in Glasgow.
Fascinated by the microcosm of Shetland, Stallwitz returned a few years later to carry out more detailed research for her recently published PhD.
Now a professor for psychology at Freiburg University of Applied Sciences, the 38 year old came back this week to present the results of her research into local heroin use.
“The findings you make here can be applied to any drug scene in the world,” she said.
She confirmed that heroin was extensively used in Shetland in the first years of the new millennia, when at least three per cent of the adult population had regular access to the class A drug.
“In 2004, more than 500 people in Shetland were using heroin, including occasional recreational users, as well as people who took heroin to calm down from partying.”
Often referred to as the ‘Viking mentality’, she added that she had never come across a community that was prepared to take risks as much as Shetlanders.
The attention has shifted away from heroin slightly now after local police made its largest ever seizure of the drug in December last year.
Legal highs as well as cocaine have become the drugs of choice for young people in the isles.
Stallwitz has developed a model which advocates cooperation with drug users rather than prosecution to achieve the aims of health professionals whose job it is to reduce the harm.
Described in scientific jargon as ‘community-mindedness’, her strategy effectively builds on the ability of the illegal drugs scene to (part)-control itself.
That way the scene would become receptive to education and prevention measures.
She said research has shown that repressive police measures only drive the drug scene underground and out of reach of health services as well as drug workers.
“Police and the courts need to understand that they have to take a harm reducing approach,” she said.
“There are possibilities to cooperate with users and the dealers as well as social services that should be utilised, like they did in the Netherlands, where they try to reduce the harm done to the community to a minimum.
“If you meet the drugs scene with violence it will react with violence. You need repression, but in a harm reducing way.”
The ‘Innovative approaches to effectively regulating illegal drug use and its consequences on the Shetland Islands’, held in the Salvation Army building, was organised by Karen Smith, NHS Shetland’s alcohol and drug development officer.
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