Most Muslim Healthcare Professionals show a vested concern in the various clincial treatment plans that are written up in the UK, especially those in which there is a possible conflict of interest from an Islamic standpoint.
One such hot potato is the whole drug treatment policy; effectively, instead of good old lashes, fines, prison or any other terrible ta’ziri punishments we’d have liked implemented on these (majority) criminal people, the UK goes for a more “supportive” role as stated by Terry Maguire of PharmacyHealthLink in his latest review of England’s drug addiction policy:
We should be clear on what is going on. UK drug policy is designed to support individuals in their drug habit rather than getting them off their drug habit. We live in a liberal democracy and one of the prices we must accept for this is an illicit drugs problem.
Muslim Pharmacists reluctantly dispense thousands of litres of Methadone, a less-harmful yet still addictive opiate-based substitute for heroin, everyday, in continual doubt of what they’re doing. And that’s not doubt surrounding whether it is Islamically permissible or not (I hold it to be permissible as we’ll show in a forthcoming research paper written by Hood Bradford and myself on the cannabis-derived drug “Sativex”), but rather because they have dispensed to the very same list of addicts for the last ten years with only an increase in daily dose and crime, as opposed to a weaning off and drop in crime figures.
This is no exaggeration. In fact, in pure economic terms, and get ready for this, Maguire calculates that to get one addict clean these days:
If we qualify “success” as getting an addict “clean” then the current service costs £1.85m for each addict returned to normal life. This is a huge figure and it does not, I believe, include the cost of all the methadone dispensed or the dispensing fees pharmacists receive as these are paid for out of a different budget.
And he’s right. Pharmacists only dispense to addicts because they can make hundreds of pounds profit from a single patient in dispensing fees. In fact, I’ve worked in some Pharmacies that depend solely on their dispensing to addicts to ensure profitability for their business.
Of course the whole thing is a scandal. And of course we should complain and make our voices heard. But we don’t. We don’t, because we feel, in the current climate, that we as Muslim “Conservatives” don’t need the “heat” to comment on such things which will only make us look even more like radical extreme fanatics and wanting Shari’ah law and all the rest of it.
I want to suggest though that taking the time to rationally explain the Islamic viewpoint as understood by orthodoxy, surrounding all the various social and personal problems in our communities, with quality evidences from both sides of the debate, will win us more friends than enemies. Maguire’s article is an interesting example of how one can test the water without causing a huge splash, questioning the liberal status-quo that has caused such a mess in this country, and as of yet, receive much support from all quarters and little criticism. He says:
Much of my life has been spent in a political environment that was not so liberal or so democratic and we did not have much of a “drug problem”. Politically motivated paramilitary organisations, often incorrectly blamed by those outside Northern Ireland for drug trafficking, were opposed to the illicit drug trade and simply shot and murdered those involved for “anti-social activity”; if it were not so serious this irony is hilarious.
It was a policy that ensured we did not have an underclass whose sole purpose in life was the procurement of heroin or cocaine. Indeed the Northern Ireland Drug Substitution scheme was only introduced in 2003 on the orders of Westminster and was put in place mainly to treat addicts returning home to a “normal society” after living for years in Great Britain.
A look at the illicit drug problems of Singapore and most Arab states shows how an aggressive criminal justice stance on drugs works. But society must have the stomach for this.
Now we don’t have to advocate shooting people (!) neither do we need to tell people about how Maguire has got it all wrong about the “success” of the Arab approach to addiction (i.e. kill the Pakistani and pardon the Arab), but what we can do is to have more confidence in challenging those ideas and concepts we see in society without having to be seen as the “whinging, demanding Islamists” that we are readily portrayed to be. Naturally, the key words are knowledge and wisdom.
If you don’t know what you’re talking about, then don’t. Talk that is.
And if you don’t know how and when to talk about what you do know, then don’t. Talk that is.
Understand your situation and refer it to those who have a deep fiqh of the Deen, and can interpret the problem into an Islamic framework, and then give you principles and concepts to promote in your spheres of influence. These scholars are few, and you’ll be able to guage their suitability yourself in most cases, but you’ll have to do the legwork. This is one of the key ways that Muslims, if they really want to fulfill their responsibility of da’wah and reform and be valuable and equal citizens, must investigate and apply in society to the best of their ability.
