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- 2 March 2005
Bloomfield Hospital Lyndon Withdrawal Unit Funding
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Page: 14522
Mr RUSSELL TURNER (Orange) [5.52 p.m.]: This afternoon I want to outline to the House concerns that I, the staff and clients, and indeed the vast majority of people in Orange have about the threatened withdrawal of funding to the Lyndon withdrawal unit based at Bloomfield Hospital in Orange. I will quote to the House from an article in the Central Western Daily that deals with some of those concerns, which have appeared almost every second day in the newspaper. The article, under the heading "Staff, clients worried about Lyndon's future, " reads as follows:
STAFF and clients at the Lyndon withdrawal unit (LWU) are facing a nervous wait in the coming weeks to see if a last-minute public campaign will be successful to keep the unit's doors open.
Despite treating 1,400 people over the last four years, the Lyndon withdrawal unit, the only one of its kind west of the mountains, will shut down by the end of March unless it gains new government funding.
Lenin CEO Peter Ryan told reporters this week he'd been "overwhelmed by community support we have received" since news of the closure emerged last week.
The article further stated:
A bureaucratic wrangle focusing on whether the embattled Lyndon withdrawal unit is treating addicts with illicit drug problems or people with alcohol problems, and therefore who should fund it, is a "smoke screen" according to Mr Ryan.
"It is irrelevant," Mr Ryan said. "We shouldn't be differentiating over whether it's alcohol or illicit drugs. People out here need a service.
"The Commonwealth did the right thing in the first place by funding this service and setting it up (to deal with) illicit drug use. We have asked the State Government to contribute towards enabling us to employ more qualified staff to enable us to do alcohol detox, because it is the most serious drug to detox."
Today I received a letter in support of the withdrawal unit from a mother in Orange and quoting one of its success stories—a story that would not have come about if the Lyndon withdrawal unit had not been based in Orange. The letter reads as follows:
I am writing on behalf of the Lyndon Withdrawal Unit (LWU) in Orange, NSW, and requesting you to lobby the Federal Government to reconsider its decision to no longer fund the LWU under the Prime Minister's NIDS [National illicit drugs strategy].
I am sure you have heard many stories of the way that drug addiction can damage the lives of both the user and the family. I still have little understanding of why my son became an addict, since we are "middle-class and respectable", not at all the type-cast in the John drug addiction that appears in the media. Yet my son was a heavy cannabis and injecting amphetamine user for many years. He became psychotic and dangerous to both himself and me. To put it simply, my life became such that I would count myself as only just being able to cope on a day-to-day basis and therefore relatively "useless" to society. My son was actually a cost to society requiring government assistance and using legal services.
To me this is why governments should care about drug addiction and invest in whatever ways they can to control it. Now that my son no longer uses drugs (not even cigarettes) we are both able to be a part of society and contribute through time and taxes. I am a member of Rotary, an Associate Professor at a university and he is now completing a degree in psychology and will do honours next year.
I can assure you it was only the existence of the LWU that enabled my son to break his habit and for us to get our lives back. I cannot fully describe what our lives were like because it would take far too long. But I accessed every agency in Bathurst during 1998 in an effort to have him detoxified and control his addiction but there was really no-one who could assist us properly at that time. He was even sectioned to Bloomfield but at that time there was no LWU so they sent him back home. A good behaviour bond resulted in my son returning to school in another town, and he did get an HSC (doing his exams stoned). Then he returned to live with me in Orange. But he was having further bouts of psychosis and in the end I needed the police to remove him from my home. It was now 2001 and he finally had somewhere to go because he could go to LWU.
The letter continues but I am running out of time. I call on the State Government to approach the Federal Government to sort out who is going to fund the Lyndon withdrawal unit, the only one of its kind west of the Blue Mountains. As was stated, quite often a person will be addicted to both drugs and alcohol and we need to sort out who is going to fund this unit.
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