Holland to help Ukraine combat drug abuse

“This country is making great efforts to assuage the problem of drug addiction. Yet, although the government has developed a special program and a grand concept to overcome drug abuse, we must admit today that drug addiction is so far getting the upper hand,” said State Committee for Family and Youth Affairs Chair Valentyna Dovzhenko, addressing a press conference over a new drug addict rehab project. Ukraine has begun to implement this project with consultations and financial assistance from the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Dutch are rightly convinced that it is impossible to effectively help the 100,000 officially registered Ukrainian addicts (they stressed that they failed to get access to documents that reflect the true state of affairs) until the currently used medication-based method (to be more exact, absence of post-medication reintegration into society and prevention of bad things) is replaced with an integrated approach which includes, above all, a system of social and psychological assistance.

Despite the many declarations of previous years, it was not until 2002 that the state committee was authorized to coordinate efforts to establish Your Victory, a network of social adaptation centers for drug-dependent young people. About a dozen such institutions are already functioning all over Ukraine. It was noted, however, that the problem of improving the quality of drug abusers’ life was inseparably linked with the quality of services rendered, which in turn requires the availability of highly trained physicians. And, while this problem has basically been solved, there is still a great deal to be done to draw up specialized syllabuses to teach medical personnel. Conversely, Holland, before pioneering in a certain liberalization of the drug usage issue, first introduced effective methods of addressing this problem through drug abuse prevention and social rehabilitation of the addicts and their families. In this way, according to Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands to Ukraine Monique Frank, the Dutch government has allocated considerable funds in order to promote a drug-free life and preventing and lowering drug-related risks; as a result, Holland has Europe’s fewest heavy drug users and related mortality.

The Ukraine-Netherlands: New Approaches in Addressing the Problem of Drug Abuse project calls for establishing an outpatient hospital in Kyiv within the next two and a half years, which will not only offer traditional assistance but also help addicts to overcome acute crises. Ukrainian experts will be offered consultation by the Dutch Trimbos Institute, which deals with mental health and various dependencies. Both the Dutch and the Ukrainian parties highly appreciate every opportunity to exchange experience, says Anatoly Viyevsky, chief drug abuse expert at Ukraine’s Ministry of Public Health. The only problem is that, according to Vadym Tocheny, chair of the Youth against Crime and Drug Abuse all-Ukrainian NGO, repeated requests to the Kyiv city authorities to get premises for this center so far remain unanswered.