Kicking junk with TRASH

>> No pain, lots of gain: a volunteer organization uses natural methods to get addicts off heroin

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

On a shoestring budget, with tools like herbal teas, thermoses and deep fat fryers, a new Montreal organization is getting addicts off heroin--painlessly.

TRASH, Techniques et références pour l'accompaniement des sevrages d'héroine, is a group of about 30 volunteers who have undergone training to help people kick heroin with natural methods. Groups of four or five of them respond to addicts' calls, going to the person's house with herbs, teas, cloth strips and deep fat fryers--used to make in-home steam baths--and over the next four days respond to the withdrawal symptoms as they occur.

"It's so fucking simple really," says TRASH's founder, a purple-mohawked welfare recipient who only wants to be known as Peter. "It's done with things you find in your kitchen." He says TRASH is constantly testing new methods: if a herbal tea doesn't show any effect within 10 minutes, Peter says, they scrap it.

TRASH treatment sounds more like a convivial bed-in with friends than a detox. "They sleep a lot, they eat a lot, they never puke," says Peter of his patients. "They'll be there telling us the treatment hasn't started because they aren't feeling any pain, and yet it's been 30 hours since they've had a hit."

A miracle cure?

At a time when months on methadone or horrific cold turkey, high-tech chemical treatments costing $10,000 a shot are seen as the only cures for heroin addiction, TRASH's methods seem practically miraculous. But, according to Peter, they work: he says TRASH's success rate with the 30 or so people it's helped kick heroin is 90 percent.

Peter, who has a CEGEP education and is so modest about his work that he refuses to be photographed for the article, says he began researching alternatives to current heroin withdrawal methods two years ago. He consulted books on herbal remedies, acupuncture pressure points and gathered tips from ex-junkies, doctors, psychologists and addiction specialists. At first he distributed the information and recipes on the street and by word of mouth. Then, at the prompting of his girlfriend, he started TRASH on June 1.

TRASH's technique is to give the body gentle pushes to help it gradually get back to normal, flushing heroin from the system and little by little regaining the natural pain suppressants that heroin made redundant. Peter stresses that heroin withdrawal is not dangerous, and says that administering an addictive medication like methadone during this process makes no sense: "They're just doing the same mistake twice."

The Hitler connection

Indeed, administering addictive chemicals to cure to other addictive chemicals has a long and depressing history. Methadone (or Dolophine--as in Adolph--as its Nazi scientist inventors called it) was developed to cure heroin addiction; heroin was invented to cure morphine addiction and morphine was developed to cure opium addiction. Peter says methadone, for one, has become more a means of controlling junkies than liberating them from dependence. Withdrawal from it can be as bad as heroin withdrawal, and some recovered heroin junkies, he says, spend the rest of their lives taking methadone.

A vital part of TRASH's process is accompaniment. TRASH members come over with food and videos and make themselves at home for the haul. No junkie is left to feel alone; no one has to stay in an institution. There's a problem with finding a detox place for homeless junkies, of course, and providing a small financial cushion for addicts who would otherwise have to make a living panhandling immediately after treatment. But TRASH is looking into a collaboration with Pops' Le Bon Dieu dans la rue to establish a quiet place somewhere in the city to take care of these people.

Elsewhere in addiction treatment circles, TRASH'S approach has been met with both support and skepticism. Jacques LeCavalier of the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, while not aware of TRASH, says his organization is all for alternative treatments for heroin addiction. It is now in the process of developing a program to "match treatment modalities to the client." These modalities, he says, include a wide range of approaches, including natural methods.

But Réal Bouchard, a nurse at the St-Luc Detox Centre in Montreal, was more wary about natural approaches to heroin withdrawal, especially for long-term addictions. He estimates that for 90 percent of long-term addicts, methadone alone will work, sometimes administered for years.

"The medical system says you will die if you don't take their pills," says Peter. "We're much more relaxed with the process."

If you'd like more information about TRASH, or want to donate money, time or an old deep fat fryer, call Peter or Catherine at 278-7274.