MONTEGO BAY, St James – A contingent of local substance abuse treatment professionals will head to Sweden next month under a programme which aims to twin cities in the region with their European counterparts.

The programme – European-Latin American and Caribbean (EU-LAC) Drug Treatment City Partnerships programme – is designed to create partnerships among cities in Latin America and the Caribbean with cities in Europe “to foster an exchange of best quality practices in drug treatment and rehabilitation programmes,” organisers said.

An initiative of the Organisation of American States/Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (OAS/CICAD), it is being developed in collaboration with Caricom.

“The visit will be in April,” executive director of Jamaica’s National Council on Drug Abuse (NCDA), Michael Tucker announced last Thursday at a two-day meeting of the EU-LAC city partnerships programme, at the Iberostar hotel here.

“We will be able to see what they have there and the possibility of using some of their treatment modalities here,”

Tucker told the conference which brought together drug treatment experts from 15 European and Caribbean states.

He said the contingent would include a wide range of drug treatment practitioners from doctors to community health workers.

“The programme is very timely as it will greatly assist the NCDA demand reduction programme which, among other things, seeks to ensure that clients who go into treatment have a great chance of recovering,” said Tucker.

He said the project should not be seen as just a filtering of ideas down from Europe to the region but an exchange, which will see Jamaica and the wider Caribbean offering substantial assistance.

“The assumption sometimes is that we are receiving and they are giving but programmes we implement are just as effective as those in Europe; the advantage they have is that they may have more human and financial resources,” he noted.

Beverly Reynolds of the Caricom Secretariat, who spoke Friday, said the partnership was vital as it brought together the producers of illicit drugs, Latin-America; the trans-shipment ports, the Caribbean and the consumers, Europe.

“It’s a realisation that we all have to work together with the producers, consumers and the areas through which it moves from one to the other,” said Reynolds. She noted that the other Caribbean countries involved in the programme included Guyana, Haiti, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica and Antigua and Barbuda.

Tucker added that while Jamaica continue to struggle with the problem of substance abuse the NCDA was making gains through its targeted programmes which looks at specific groups such as substance abuse and HIV; substance abuse and education system and substance abuse and the workplace.

Currently, he said, the island had five hospital-based programmes comprising inpatient and outpatient care; five major NGO programmes, three residential and two outpatient, as well as 50 mental heath clinics complemented by NCDA field staff, psychiatrists and psychologists who work on a rotating basis; 10 community clinics, NCDA/NGO partnerships and a total of 130 beds for substance abusers.