Giving Methadone to soldiers. What it hides. Published in the Dimokratia Newspaper
During my professional career as a police officer I have been called upon to assist in several cases related to drug trafficking or drug use. The government’s decision to administer methadone to soldier users willy-nilly conjures up images of these moments in my professional experience. For most people, drugs are a distant memory. Most people usually learn about them from the news, newspapers, read relevant statistics and keep up with events from a safe distance. The real contact with the drug world is when you or someone close to you becomes a user or when you are in the drug world for business reasons.
On the basis of my professional involvement in the drugs field, I believe that the state’s support for the rehabilitation of conscripts by providing them with substitutes is a compromise and a crude solution that cannot be a real answer to the problem. First of all, we must understand that drug use demonstrates the pathogenicity of the user’s family. Drugs are a threat to youth as a whole, but they only resonate with people who, because of past experiences, are vulnerable to them. Drugs affect the children of both the rich and the poor.
My experience with kids who got into trouble reminds me that none of the ones I saw slip into it had a normal relationship with their parents, although in some cases it was seemingly good.
Drug treatment can be divided into two stages. One of prevention and one of repression. Unfortunately, most people focus on the latter. However much we may be convinced that we live in a society of laws and criminal justice, what characterises offences such as drugs is the intention to retaliate against the drug dealer, not prevention. It is perhaps the easiest way to completely miss the point of intervention. If a drug dealer got ten young people into drugs and is given a life sentence, it does not change the fact that ten young people are “lost”.
The ideal would be to prevent the phenomenon, to prevent children themselves from taking drugs from the dealer, a society of conscious young people who would refuse to become users.
As several cases have shown, an important period of time very crucial for the outcome of a user’s journey is the early stages. This time is often wasted because parents do not realise in time that their child is using drugs.
At the next stage, rehabilitation is a much more difficult and psychologically demanding process, since reality shows that a detoxification programme is not enough of a solution if the addict does not completely change friendships, neighbourhood, habits, lifestyle and, in general, if he or she does not form a completely new individual identity. If the state were to provide sufficient information on drugs, the number of young people reaching these stages would be reduced, since parents would have intervened, realising early on what was happening.
So seeing the decision to administer methadone in the camps, I wonder if there is an organised drug prevention plan in place, and if the administration of methadone is a step in the next stage of the crackdown, or if the administration of methadone in the camps is the state’s overall response to the drug problem.
*Nikolaos Pelekasis has been trained in Greece and abroad in individual and group security and for many years served in intelligence agencies.
