Understanding & Working with a Clients Drug Use


Understanding & Working with a Clients Drug Use

Facilitated by Dave McNamara

9 May 2009

·  The hidden history of drugs

·  Reasons for drug taking / theories of drug use

·  Drugs: categories, types and effects

·  The Placebo Effect 

·  Drug, set & setting

The Just Say Know Drug & Alcohol Awareness Training has, since 2002, provided workshops, courses and consultation to a wide variety of service providers across East Sussex. Informed by an appreciation of the role and importance of altered states of consciousness in all human societies throughout history, the training offers a meaningful framework with which to actually understand drugs and drug taking behaviours rather than simply condemning them. In seeking to step outside the current mad and bad, weak and wicked, any-use-as-abuse orthodoxy of prohibition (with its roots in cultural imperialism, historical revisionism, religious intolerance, racism and class bias, not in health, safety or science), the harm minimisation orientated training explores a range of approaches and perspectives that the evidence confirms as more practically useful way of communicating to, understanding and working with people who use alcohol and drugs, as well as offering a range of experiential exercises for trainees to participate in.

  • To explore the ‘hidden history’ of drugs and drug use.
  • To raise awareness of some of the common myths and assumptions surrounding drugs and drug users, and the ways these might impact on the client themselves and/or on the attitudes of others towards them.
  • To enable participants to identify the role that psychological, social and environmental factors have on the drug experience.

  • To allow participants to identify the category and effects of different drugs and to enable participants to familiarise themselves with different reasons for people’s drug use


  • Participants will have a more informed understanding of drugs, their use and history.
  • Participants will be able to demonstrate an appreciation of the impact some common assumptions and drug myths might have on both client and counsellor.
  • Participants will have an active appreciation of the role played by set and setting in influencing the drug experience.
  • Participants will have an increased awareness of drug categories and effects.
  • Participants will have an improved understanding of the ‘placebo effect’.

 


 Dave McNamara

With a background in art-based workshop provision, facilitating training groups and teaching, Dave McNamara also has over fifteen years experience of working holistically with drug users and drug use in a wide range of settings. A drug and alcohol worker in Brighton & Hove since 2000, he has been delivering high quality drug and alcohol awareness and harm minimisation training for the last 5 years to a wide variety of organisations and service providers across East Sussex, including Action4Change, addaction, YMCA, Equinox and CRI.  He has also written a drug information comic for young people and has contributed to recently published drug and alcohol harm minimisation manuals.