Editorial
Taking care of drug addicts
Standardise rehab clinics
ALTHOUGH drug addiction has been identified as an area of grave concern, with the number of addicts increasing alarmingly day by day, the treatment and rehabilitation centres are in bad shape, to say the least. The response in terms of treatment of this highly debilitating social malady is nowhere near what it should be, not even in Dhaka city.
Examples should make the point clear. The 115 clinics in the city that are known as drug addiction treatment and rehabilitation centres are being run illegally without any licence issued by the Department of Narcotics Control. This obviously is a lapse of a very serious kind, which puts a question mark on the validity of the whole business.
Most of the clinics don't even have qualified doctors or nurses. It is difficult to comprehend how untrained doctors and nurses could treat addicts who don't quite fall in any common category of patients. Yet, this is happening year after year without the matter being noticed or any objection being raised by the cheated patients or their families or the ministry concerned acting of its own.
Needless to say, the treatment seekers cannot expect much from the clinics that did not even bother to go by the rules. Some of them may be doing a good job but because they are not subjecting themselves to any discipline in a specialised field tends to make them unethical and non-professional ventures. They need to be standardised.
The narcotic department or, for that matter, the government is also to blame for not enforcing rules to bring them under a uniform system of oversight and make them deliver the goods they are charging for.
It is really disquieting to think how many lives have already been ruined in the name of rehabilitation due to the quackery practised in most of those clinics. The job at hand is to screen the existing rehab centres against certain set criteria and retain those with potential to improve and modernise themselves while jettisoning others that fail the tests.
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