The use of drugs is as old as humankind.
For the most part drugs have been used for healing, spiritual purposes and
recreation with very little negative consequences (Hoffmann 1990). However
there has always been a small minority of people who have become problematic
drug users. Drug use becomes problematic
when it becomes the sole focus of one’s life and when their use harms the user,
their family and the community they live in. This small percentage of
problematic drug users from within the drug use community could best be described as “addicts”.
.(Alexander and Schweighofer 1988).
This study will attempt to understand how
and why certain people, at certain points in their lives, turn to drugs for
relief, become addicted, and how and why they recover. It will do this by exploring the oral
histories of previously addicted heroin users, now in recovery.
Both
‘addiction’ and ‘recovery’ are contested terms. The meaning we give to these
terms has profound implications for our approach to policy and treatment.
Different models have different measures and diverse underlying concepts and
normative outcomes. It could be said, however, that all treatment models aim
towards what can be broadly called ‘recovery’. [1] An
essential part of this study is to explore what these terms mean to the
recovering addicted user, to begin to understand these from lived experiences.
The aim of the study is to allow the subject free
rein to tell their life stories in their own words, to construct it in ways
that are meaningful to them. Through analyzing these stories the aim is to gain
a greater understanding into the pathways of addiction and recovery. This information can then be used to inform
debates around the nature and the lived realities of addiction, but also the
effectiveness of different treatment and policy models.
The objectives are as follows:
1
to
record the oral histories of a group of addicted heroin users in recovery.
2
to analyse the narratives to extract common
themes relating to pathways in and out of addiction.
3
to assess the emergent themes in relation to the
various theoretical and evidential debates about addiction and recovery in the
existing literature, particularly relating to current treatment models.
4
to use the
insight gained to begin to identify the strengths and address the
limitations in the current treatment models by engaging with current policy and
the various agents involved in treatment of drug addiction.
The primary question that will be
asked is: What insight can we gain from the oral
histories of recovering addicted heroin users that might assist in identifying
the strengths and addressing the limitations of present treatment models in
South Africa?
No comments:
Post a Comment