Hard economic conditions demand we be ever more clear with communities on the impact of our work November – 2008

“People aren’t going to be worried about drug users at all…its simply not going to be good enough to say ‘people are marginal’.”

Ian Wardle
CEO Lifeline project

‘Extract from Fitting into the Future’

Without a vision, serious self-criticism is impossible.

It is easy to sneer at long-term exercises in ‘visioning’, but a serious, integrated approach to tackling deep-rooted inequality and deprivation is, quite frankly, inconceivable without a dedicated, explicit and strongly aspirational long-term plan. So although ‘Treatment may Work’ and ‘Treatment may be Good’ it does not in any way excuse us, as an industry, from developing a solid critique of all those things about treatment that don’t work and aren’t good. If we are unable to do this, and to do it in such a way that the public can see that we are capable of going beyond the narrow short-term interests of our own organisations, then we will not be able to face the public honestly and with conviction. And we will struggle to explain what our vision for the future is. At the moment, we are more than happy to let the NTA take it on the chin for the rest of us. We will not be allowed to get away with this for very much longer.

Without a vision, the already considerable uncertainty that surrounds our future will grow to the point that it will be virtually impossible to analyse our achievements and shortcomings in a way that is balanced and helpful, either for ourselves, or for those who criticise us. A number of clear-sighted critics variously positioned across a spectrum of widely different views and approaches are already far from convinced in our performance as an industry.