I see - according to Drink and Drugs News - there is to be a review of methadone policy in Scotland following the death of the 2 year old. I was on a Southwark substance misuse / mental health child protection conference last week and there was discussion about the risks of children obtaining methadone etc. It reinforced for me the importance of reminding people re safe storage. However I hope methadone won't have to be taken only under medical supervision, as the Scottish Parliament have recommended.

I think somewhere i read that 90%+ of methadone in scotland is supervised ?.

Just to put that particular tragic and unneccessary death in context, this is from the Medicines Control Agency

"Iron is a commonly associated with accidental overdose in young children, with serious and sometimes fatal outcome. Accounting for 2-3% of hospital admissions for accidental overdose in 0-4 year-olds with about 1 death per year. There were some 541 hospital admissions due to suspected iron overdose in 1-4 years-olds in the 3-years 1996-1999."

Is anyone leading the campaign to take into protective custody all the offspring those evil anaemic parents who are threatening the safety and well being of their children by such feckless self-centred behaviour? Not one question in the House? No headline in the red top press?

This weeks Drink and Drug news has a thought provoking article examining recent reports of children exposed to opiates and the issues surrounding drug-using parents. I recommend that everyone read it and then join the debate here. This is the link, hope it works

http://www.drinkanddrugs.net/features/march1306/when_ad...n_means_adoption.pdf

depends where you are. but to be brutally honest, there has been tacit acceptance of street leakage for years in certain areas, and also a complete blindness to the nature of addiction and how it causes people to behave. it has been extremely easy for patients to present themselves as "stable" and get off supervision without anyone asking too many questions about what that actually means, or assessing the risk to any children they may have. if in doubt, read the transcript of the Caleb Ness enquiry which is quite horrific....
.........i kept all my patients on s/c for a lot longer than was common in my area. my view is that the safest place to store the meth is inside the patient. that way vulnerable punters don't get beaten up and "taxed" outside the pharmacy.........the pharmacist eyeballs them every day and if they don't turn up or he/she is concerned they call us.....so the patient would be unlikely to lie dead for six weeks without anyone noticing or wondering where her child was, as Anne-Marie McGarrity did.......one of the suspicions about Derek Doran is that the parents may have actually given him the meth on his dummy to calm him down, and putting alcohol or Valium in the baby bottle certainly has a long and noble history.......gripe-water-and-tonic, anyone?.....
........there's a saying in recovery circles that as addiction progresses "the unacceptable becomes acceptable". the mistake that services have sometimes made is to assume that addicted patients think in the same way as everyone else, but addiction has its own logic and language, and they don't. i don't think it's kind to patients to collude with them in denying the realities of what their illness means..........after all, we often have to tell people things they're not going to like and deal with their reaction. however, the Executive talking about taking more kids into care is not helpful.........it would be nice to get across the idea to patients that social work involvement is to help and support them in raising their kids, not take them away........

If I was a heroin using parent, living in scotland just now, i would be very inlikely to go anywhere near treatment services, and certainly would be unlikely to feel able to trust any person in authority who might in other circumstances be able to help me, with headlines like "when addiction means adoption"

I work closely with social services in my area to get help and services for patients, and am lucky to be well away from scotland at the present time. This does not just apply to drug use problems. A mother came to me last week and said "they want to put a care order on her for neglect of education.. you've got to help us" I was able to say, to her surprise, "good.. well I think thats an excellent idea. At last we will be able to ask them to provide transport to school and back, so that your agrophobia does not prevent her getting educated. "

I have a report in front of me now, about a recovered alcoholic patient who spent his childhood being abused in every possible way, while theoretically in the care of the authorities in Co Galway. I think it is very unusual for a child to be "better off in care" and headlines like these are misguided and damaging becuse the very few who do need to be cared for away from their families are even less likely to engage with the services which appear to offer only this draconian final solution.

Having said all that, bringing up small children is clearly a 24 hour job, and these families are the ones i drag back in to see me the most frquently, and get people to do home visits, and just try to engage as much nosey intervention as helpfully possible, communicating with health visitors, midwives and social services all along the way.

Yes agree with all that Judith. I have several clients with small children who are doing well at parenting and making every effort to stabilse their drug use and lives. I am going to a social services review with one next week, at her request. They need support and encouragement.

Wouldn't it be nice if the media reported some good news stories ?.
Fortunately we have 'The Barnsley chronicle' which is published weekly and we have had 2 recent stories of how people have turned there lives around. There were so many people wrote in the letters page saying how good it wasthat these ex-addicts had done so well. Maybe the national papers might do this instead of bad news, bingo and boobs.

On the subject of families going into services, here was a really brilliant user Advocate speaker at the Glasgow conference. she had videod her daughter talking about the effect the waiting room at their drug treatment cnetre had had on her - it was uncomfortable viewing. Anna Millington (name's just come to me) said it was a form of hidden harm still inflicted on children by services that try to protect the children from just that. We all comae away with a mission to do something about creating a family waiting space, away from the other users' waiting area.
I have been reading about the training educators get in scandiv=navia recently, and hearing about that of social workers. In all cases the training is very long and involves a lot of personal development work. It strikes me we need to do something like this here, so a referral to social work becomes a straightforwardly positive thing to do. It would cost money but it would be worth it

yes Susi there were lots of interesting points there. Parents don't want their children (and their children don't either) to see loads of posters with graphic images of drug taking and don't want to leave them in waiting rooms full of strangers were the two main points I got.

On a related subject did anyone read Neil McKeganny's article in DDN this week saying parents using heroin should be given a year to stop using heroin after which their children should be put up for adoption.

Jim Jones has invited a discussion on anothjer thread:
http://smmgp.groupee.net/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9954030...141059851#2141059851

cheers SImon

I missed that