For The Bohol Tribune
In This Our Journey
NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS
As readers of this
column know, the year-long advocacy that something be done about the
serious drug addiction
problem in the province led in the dying hours of last year to the
establishment of Bohol’s first drug rehabilitation center in Upper Laya,
Baclayon. Two noted drug rehab facilities, the Family and Recovery Management
(FARM) facility in Minglanilla, Cebu and the It Works Chemical Dependency
Treatment Center in Ozamiz City, both of which we visited in the course of
doing research on the operations of such facilities, both agreed to combine
technical and funding resources to establish what is now known as the FARM It
Works Balay Kahayag (FITWBK) center.
FITWBK utilizes facilities of the ten-year old Balay Kahayag
Training and Retreat Center used previously by our NGO, the Bohol Local
Development Foundation (BLDF), as venue for training project participants,
mostly disadvantaged households and groups, from remote mountain and outer
island communities. These poverty groups have been our primary targets for
development information and assistance for over thirty years starting with the
now defunct UNICEF-assisted Ilaw International Center (IIC) located in Bool,
Tagbilaran City.
In addition to their having high levels of deprivation, these
groups, mostly subsistence farmers and sustenance fisher folks, inhabit ecological
sites, such as watersheds and large portions of marginal land, as well as
near-shore areas, all considered as vulnerable to environmental threats and
degradation due to adverse climatic changes.
This initial awareness about the role of geographic space in
determining priority development targets has led me for as long as I can
remember to adopt the so-called area-based perspective in my development work
rather than take a purely sectoral approach. Simply put, it will not do to know
only, for instance, how many are the malnourished children as part of a
national database, but it is more important to go down to the local level and know
the specific family to which the child belongs and the community where the family
lives. Knowledge about where a problem exists, broken down to specific
barangays and puroks, as well as households, is a necessary component of an
area-based approach.
Applied to our current advocacy to assist young drug abuse
victims from indigent families so they can have access to treatment services at
the FITWBK, it is just logical to think there is a need for a detailed database
indicating where they live and other details which can help map out an
effective strategy to provide a full range of pre-treatment, treatment and
post-treatment services to specific individuals and groups.
All these can help the Government and other sectors to
implement a comprehensive package of services for the prevention and full
rehabilitation of drug abuse victims. That phrase “other details “ in the
previous paragraph I may have to elaborate in the light of new learnings about
how the place factor impacts on human behavior.
I read for the nth time a book, The Power of Place, written
by Winifred Gallagher, and I now that phrase “other details: in a significantly
different light. There is simply too much to learn about how a place influences
the way we behave. Let me share a few insights from the book, which is
subtitled “How our surroundings shape our thoughts, emotions and actions.”
On page 134 of the paperback edition, Gallagher writes: “Although
we usually think of drugs when we hear of the word addiction, the term applies
to our habitual or compulsive devotion. Much of the strength of that devotion,
whether to a person, an intoxicant, or a pursuit, comes from the environments
of our past and present which hover like ghosts beneath the surface of our
awareness, haunting us and our behavior.”
Then the author says on the next page: “If the drug is the
spider of addiction, it more and more seems that the settings in which it is used
comprise the web.”
He then quotes another authority, Susan Weis, who says: “We
have a lot of intricate data on drugs and what they do to this or that receptor
in the brain, but very little of it helps explain their effects on abusers. . .
There’s more to addiction than chemicals and personal psychology, because we
can detox someone who is highly motivated to change, and he can still fail. The
missing dimension is the environmental factors that precipitate drug use.”
Weis further says: “Our brains are so adapted to make
associations with the environment that whether we want to or not, we think our
experiences and their settings, and those two together produce the behavior.”
Author Gallagher then explains: “… the groundwork of
addiction – the getting-to-like-it stage is laid in the representational memory
system. Later, the associations made with drugs move over to the habit system,
far less accessible to our conscious interventions. There, all sorts of
sublimated cues can trigger the urge to get high, which makes kicking a drug habit
difficult even for the well-motivated.”
He describes what seems to be a typical scene involving a
drug addict: “He walks into a certain hangout frequented by his drug-using
friends, and their faces and the music, colors, light, and smells all spell ‘high.’
Because his positive associations with these cases are locked into his brain by
a potent chemical reinforcer … “ even the sight of his paycheck will prompt a powerful
involuntary urge to use drugs because paychecks mean a binge,” according to
Weis, as quoted by the author. The author concludes this chapter by saying: “One
reason traditional addiction program have had such a poor track record is they
have largely ignored the role of the environment. He then quotes Shepard Siegel:
“Treatment should involve systematic exposure to drug-related
environmental cues without the reinforcement of getting the drug, so the addict’s
body learns not to give the anticipatory reaction. The best treatment of all
remains the geographical cure. Studies from all over the world show that after
a year, most of those who don’t relapse after drug treatment have relocated.
The new environment may not even be drug-free or even seem very different – it could
be another ghetto, for example, but it’s free of the cues associated with use
for that person.”
We hope academic institutions in Bohol with its Psychology
departments will come forward and partner with FITWBK and BLDF in conducting
studies on the impact of environment on the behavior of drug abusers. Researches
are needed on practical issues such as how
best to manage environmental influences to ensure the full rehabilitation of drug abuse victims and their
integration into normal community and family life.
Lastly, I would like to thank Fr. Val Pinlac for being the
first to visit the FITWBK and see for himself what is still needed to make the
facility fully operational. He was allowed to meet with clients for what he
described as a “most enlightening” session. Last Sunday, he endorsed and hand-carried
a proposal prepared by BLDF for submission to an international NGO, the For A
Better Tomorrow (FBT) which will provide subsidies for an initial batch of 35
clients.
I would like also to thank Luigi Rulida and three other
members of his team (Jayson Rey Sayson; Isidro Macabenta; Josephine Sarigumba)
all Architenture students from the Bohol Island State University (BISU) who
volunteered to design a nature-friendly facility to complement FITWBK on the
same location. For comments, email: npestelos@gmail.com
NMP/12 Feb 2016/5.21 p.m.
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