Dealing with addiction

Press, 1 December 1987, Page 21

Dealing with addiction

The ongoing project at Auckland’s Odyssey House for the rehabilitation of drug addicts is the subject for the first of three TVNZ documentaries screening in the "Tuesday Documentary” slot this month. "Odyssey” screens at 9 on One tonight. Mark Thomas, a 33-year-old former drug addict, is one of the main subjects in this documentary. He was nearing the end of his two-year stay at Odyssey House when the programme was filmed in June and July this year. The documentary shows Thomas’s counselling work with newer residents, providing an insight into how the drug rehabilitation programme works. Therapy sessions

are filmed where the residents are encouraged to bare their true colours. Before entering Odyssey House, Mark Thomas’s future looked bleak. A drug addict since the age of 17, he had spent most of his adult life in and out of jail for drug-related crimes. . After living in Australia for five years, he faced further charges — of importing, trafficking and selling — and was deported to New Zealand where he immediately got involved in the homebake scene. After his second arrest for manufacturing homebake, the judge offered him a choice — several years imprisonment or the Odyssey

House programme. To opt for Odyssey House means a two-year commitment. “I was a bit frightened,” says Mark. “I kept telling myself I could leave. I kept telling myself that for three months. “The hardest part was realising that I was 31 and that I was starting again. If you’ve been in the drug scene that long, everything in your life is drug-related — your friends, everything. The hardest part was looking forward. I couldn’t see what sort of future there could be without all that.” It used to be thought that drug addiction was a disease over which people had little control. How-

ever, Odyssey House operates on the concept that drug addicts become caught up in a drug-using lifestyles from which it is difficult to escape. Odyssey House aims to provide an alternative — building up new support systems, modifying behaviour, and equipping residents with the tools for survival outside the drug world. Now that he is a graduate of the programme, and his life has made a dramatic turnaround, Mark is keen to let others know what Odyssey House has to offer. “It’s a therapeutic community where the person themself does the work. Odyssey House just provides the vehicle.”