The ACMD (short for Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs) is the 'expert' body set up to advise Government and people working in the drugs field about all aspects of illegal drug use. It has just published a report called Reducing Drug Related Deaths (Stationery Office 2000). 124 pages long and almost impossible to read, it's about as interesting as watching paint dry. Still, it's Monkey's job to read and digest this shit on your behalf. So, here it is. We start with a potted account of the risk factors around o.d., consider what they have to say about methadone and look at their suggestions for preventing drug-related deaths.

OVERDOSE RISK FACTORS

You are more likely to OD;

[#] If you are an injector

[#] If you use opiates (heroin, methadone etc)

[#] If you are unemployed, unskilled and poor

[#] If you inject your drugs in a public place (e.g. public toilets, unfamiliar room in hostel, etc.)

[#] If you inject alone

[#] If you OD in front of your mates and they DON'T simply put you in the recovery position, ring an ambulance and wait with you till it comes

[#] If you have just got out of the big house or have been off gear for a time for some other reason

[#] If you are fairly new to injecting drug use

[#] If you have been an injector for a long time (average age of death for injecting users is late twenties/early thirties)

[#] If you are suffering from depression or other mental health problems (suicide risk)

[#] If you have HIV/AIDS (suicide risk)

So, whether, you're a boy or a girl (each is equally at risk, though women may be at slightly higher risk) those are the things to watch for.

METHADONE

As is the fashion these days, methadone gets a good bashing. In fact, so determined are they to have a go at the juice, they even resort to a bit of statistical jiggery-pokery (or just plain lies, if you prefer) to show how dangerous it is. We won't bore you with the details, but what they do is add together figures for methadone deaths in a way that actually inflates them. So they say 371 people died as a result of methadone in 1993, rising to a figure of 674 in 1997 when, on their own account elsewhere, the true figures are 230 in 1993 and 421 in 1997. Never let the truth get in the way of a good argument. But why bother slamming methadone? Because they don't want illicit methadone on the streets, they want to get the private doctors in London and they want you to drink your juice in the chemists. Simple.

PREVENTION OF DRUG RELATED DEATHS

If we are to do this, we should:

[#] Collect better figures

[#] Agencies (including the Prison Service!) need to get their acts together and liaise
more closely about this

[#] More training for professionals on prevention

[#] Tackle poverty as this breeds the conditions for serious drug misuse to occur

[#] Bring more users into treatment

[#] Make sure its hard to get methadone

[#] Do something (not sure what) about Hep B & C

[#] More research

[#] Do something (unspecified) for users families

[#] Make DATs (Drug Action Teams) responsible for reducing such deaths

[#] BRING USERS INTO PARTNERSHIPS TO REDUCE DEATHS

And, to the last, we say 'That's not the only issue that users need involving in!'