Independent Professional Services

European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf is right, important insights on addiction need sharing with a wider audience. Addiction is on the increase.

I want to stress that addiction is an illness. I’m a subject expert. I am an addict/Alcoholic in recovery, i.e. clean for today and 9,000 days plus. In my experience, the perception of the addict has changed over the last 25 years. Today, it is much easier to ‘Admit’ ‘I’m addicted’ (as if I have a choice) than when I got clean. Newly sober, I had building insurances doubled, overdraft cancelled etc.

Alcoholism is a disease as recognized by the World Health Organization. There is no cure recovery in abstention. Therefore, sadly I’m an addict, not ex-addict. It’s great to see people like Dr Alf opening up this discussion.

I am extremely lucky to have had expert full-time treatment, locked in a unit for three months and then love support from family and friends. The real misconception is normal people do not understand the addict mind – why should they? It is after all, my disease and my responsibility to keep clean. However, I needed those three months ‘locked-up’ to begin recovery.

There are some important takeaways for drug addiction. All addiction is a disease, including drugs. It’s impossible to combat addiction without professional help. In the case of drugs, there’s another debate about whether treatment should include substitute drugs. The bottom line is the addict must recognize that they’re an addict, even after they’re clean from symptoms.

Ian Geddes,

Cyprus

The Guardian reports on ‘Activate‘, the new conservative group which draws inspiration from Labour, as it tries to engage young people in politics, suggesting that the launch on social media has been widely mocked. (open link for Activate’s Twitter account)

Source: Activate: Tories mimic Momentum with grassroots campaign | Politics | The Guardian

Momentum is driven by passionate Far Left activists for whom the end justifies the means. For them the Labour Party is a stepping stone to revolution. Clearly, Momentum is much more than a political process.

The weakness of the Activate initiative is that there’s currently no overall recognizable brand of British conservatism. [see my blog of the UK Conservative Party’s 2017 Manifesto]. The New Right seem out of fashion – Conservative MPs who are not ready to embrace radicalism fall back of traditional conservatism with its privileges and lazy stereotypes for whom there are magical doors to career opportunities – the antithesis of meritocracy.

Young people need to believe that the Conservative Party is more about high-achievement and meritocracy than nepotism.

There are still young people in the UK who believe in advanced education, hard-work, achievement, individualism, risk-taking and small government. These are the political values of people like my fellow blogger, John Gelmini and myself. Sadly, the UK Conservative Party seems now more associated to those who leverage privilege and inherited wealth, rather than individual achievement. To capture young people’s vote, policies need to be imaginative in terms of housing, education and upskilling – this will be challenging with an increasing number of jobs being replaced by technology.

The people to whom Activate should appeal will have already put in place personal contingency plans to move overseas if Jeremy Corbyn’s Far Left Labour Government wins the next election. So not only will we have more socialism but with the high achievers gone, the lazzy and the scroungers will be more evident.

Thoughts?