Community is where the guns and gangs, the drugs and pimps are.

Last week on the Radio 4 Today programme there was a very moving interview with a young woman (lets call her Sarah) who was about to go to University and who spoke articulately about her hopes for the future. A few months before this interview the same woman had been addicted to heroin and crack and had been prostituting herself out to maintain her habit. What was absolutely clear from this interview was that the community was not in any way part of the solution – indeed it was the problem. Sarah’s ability to come off drugs was because she had been lucky enough to be sent by her local authority to a residential rehabilitation centre in the countryside many miles away from the inner city neighbourhood where she lived. She readily agreed that it was only when she was able to get away from “the community” that she could summon the strength to recover. Had she continued to live in her local neighbourhood she would have continued to be plagued by the pimps and pushers she needed to get away from. These same pimps and pushers would have been waiting for her the moment she left any local rehabilitation centre and that this is why drug treatment in the community is a non starter.

Sadly the residential centre was now closing because so few local authorities were prepared to spend the amount necessary to secure effective rehabilitation outcomes but rather preferred to spend less money on “treatment in the community” despite the fact that it has a far less successful record. Far less successful it may be, but by adding the cosy, trendy (but utterly vacuous) words “in the community” to the notion of treatment, these local authorities are able to disguise their miserly and counterproductive penny pinching. They were able to use the term “community” to make it sound as though they were buying a service that would be effective just by virtue of being capable of having this sanctifying (but really sanctimonious) description applied to it.