Cure with hard labour

Press, 19 June 1986, Page 21

Cure with hard labour

Kahanui is a residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre equidistant between Whakatane and Opotiki — 10 miles of bad road off the East Coast highway. It now has 22 patients almost all of whom were referred by the Justice Department; eight of them under community care sentences, none of them from the region. Kahanui’s involvement in the community care programme is therefore quite separate from the Bay of Plenty, most of its people being from the big centre — Wellington, Christchurch, Auckland, and Hamilton. The centre is privately owned and survives on grants, the sickness benefits of those in care, economies, and the self-sacrifice of the therapists who pay themselves only $12.50 a week. It was set up in the early 1970 s by a small group of disaffected graduates who wanted a hippiecommune lifestyle, and owes its remoteness more to land values than to choice —• although the

By

PATRICIA HERBERT

retreat-like atmosphere helps the therapy. Ms Sandra Cummings, a therapist and one of the founders, says their course is an amalgam of different therapeutic techniques and is designed to run for 12 to 18 months. This creates a potential problem as the Criminal Justice Act rules that if a community care sentence is residential, it must be limited to six months. Ms Cummings is not too bothered, however. She says many of their referrals leave within days or weeks of arriving because they have not accepted that they need treatment and are not prepared to accept the strictures of Kahanui. Those who leave go back before the Courts. For those who elect to stay the full term, the strictures are considerable. The centre is like a marae in its emphasis on togetherness, like a boarding school in its dormi-

tory sleeping arrangements and in its prohibitions; no sex, no alcohol, no drugs, not even television. Also, it involves work — lots of it. The patients tend the gardens and the stock, extensive enough to make Kahanui self-sufficient in most meats and vegetables, and are responsible for basic maintenance and house-keeping.. And, while they work, they are supposed to submit themselves to relentless self-examination combined with which there are regular formal therapy sessions. Kahanui will accept people in the 17 to 30 age group. It finds that younger than that, they will not work; and older, they cannot adjust to the communal living. Of every 10 admissions, seven leave in the first eight weeks, but Ms Cummings says this defection rate is “fairly common in most treatments.” The impact of community care on the centre has been to in-

crease the criminal element which has made discipline harder to maintain but Kahanui brooks no violence. If a punch is thrown, the culprit goes “down the road” — no excuses, no discussion. It is, however, a reasonably infrequent occurrence and has led to only 10 expulsions since the centre’s opening. This is because precautions are taken. Patients are not accepted if they have a history of mental illness or - a tendency 'to--, get violent without the trigger of alcohol or drugs. Ms Cummings thinks community care a good idea because it gives people a chance. Even if some abuse it and others fail to rehabilitate, she thinks it worth pursuing for those who may benefit. She also thinks the six months* limitation may be workable either because people get hooked into the course and elect to stay and complete it, or because their problem is not primarily drugrelated so may be dealt with in a shortened period.