THE CRUCIAL need to invest more resources in early intervention to prevent young people from going down the painful road of drug and alcohol addiction was highlighted at a conference yesterday by the governor of Mountjoy Prison, John Lonergan.
“Intervening at the right time and place can make a difference. It’s about not making judgments, but offering support and assistance. It’s about saying to the person: ‘I know you can make it and I’ll help you.’ Something as simple as that can be hugely important for somebody who has never heard it before.”
Mr Lonergan was speaking in Cork yesterday at a conference organised by Cork City Partnership during Cork Drug Awareness Week. The event, entitled Brief Interventions to reduce Drug and Alcohol-Related Harm: Who, Where and When?, took place in the context of increasing evidence of the effectiveness of such interventions in the management of people misusing drugs or alcohol
Mr Lonergan said the challenges of modern society had led to feelings of discontent, hopelessness, alienation and huge pressure on young people to measure up. It was often such feelings that caused people to become addicts.
He paid tribute to the addiction services in Ireland.
Paul Delaney, director of the Council for Addiction Information and Mediation and co-ordinator of the Cornmarket Project in Wexford (a treatment and rehab project), said that brief intervention was a practice that aimed to identify a real or potential problem and motivate an individual to do something about it.
His advice to parents whose children were using drugs was to keep the lines of communication open. He said their first port of call should be the family GP.
