Young woman died of drug overdose due to lack of local services, Citizens’ Assembly told

A 24-year-old mother of one died of an overdose after becoming homeless due to a lack of methadone services in her local area, the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use was told on Sunday.

Austin O’Carroll, an inner-city Dublin GP who focuses on marginalised communities, said while many services providing addiction support were excellent, there was a need to make sure each local area had services and that they were trauma-informed.

“I had a young 24-year-old girl who became homeless because there was no methadone treatment in her hometown in the midlands. She came up to us, she had a four-year-old daughter. She was a very eloquent woman, a lovely woman, and we discovered that she left her hometown,” he said.

“We said we’d get her back there. We got her a pharmacy, got her on to methadone treatment, and we tried to get her a GP. No GP would take her on for opioid substitution treatment.”

Dr O’Carroll said the woman travelled up to his practice every two weeks for prescriptions.

“After nine months, she came up and stayed in a hostel where she was violently sexually assaulted, she ended up on the street because of that trauma and died of an overdose a week later,” he said.

“If a GP had taken her on for treatment in that hometown, she would be alive and her daughter would have a mother. I just think that’s disgraceful. I think people have to take responsibility locally so you don’t need to leave your local area.”

Dr O’Carroll was speaking at the third sitting of the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use on Sunday. The meeting also heard about the correlation between addiction and the criminal justice system.

Jo-Hanna Ivers, associate professor in addiction at Trinity College Dublin, said prisons could be a “microsystem” for recovery from drug and alcohol abuse due to the stability it provided to inmates.

“People have a house, they are connected with community, they have peers that can bring them along. If we look at that therapeutic model of peer-driven support, prison is somewhere that we could really do a lot of work,” she said.

“Yes, there are people there that shouldn’t be in prison, but there are also people there who have been there for a long time that deserve access to recovery services and addiction services. It’s about switching the lens.”

Paul Reid, chairman of the assembly, said one of the biggest takeaways of the weekend was that recovery was not just a phase, “it’s a continued life cycle. It’s for life.”

“The supports we need to put around people are not just for a certain phase. It needs to be a high priority for society,” he said.

Mr Reid said it needed to be a whole-of-society response and a whole-of-government response.

“Until we get that landed, that this is not just about areas of high social deprivation because they suffer the most, but until we get that whole-of-government and whole-of-society response, people will continue to be marginalised, stigmatised and suffer,” he added.

The assembly has now reached the halfway point of its work and will meet again in early September to consider legislative and criminal justice issues relating to reducing the harmful impact of drug use.

Two further meetings will be held in the autumn to develop, discuss and agree a final set of recommendations to be compiled into a report for the Government by the end of this year.

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