Executives go to foreign clinics for addictions

Big New Zealand companies are sending executives with alcohol and drug problems to treatment centres in Australia and the United States because the most suitable clinics for them in this country have closed.

Drug and alcohol counsellors say Air New Zealand, oil companies and the defence forces have all sent executives overseas since the closure of Hanmer's Queen Mary Hospital in 2003.

Nine other treatment centres for the public have closed in the past 12 years, including Kahunui at Opotiki and the Salvation Army's Rotoroa Island near Auckland last year.

One of the two treatment centres for male prisoners, at Rolleston Prison near Christchurch, was shut late last year because its staff were judged to lack the required "expertise and collegial support". The sole prison centre for men, at Waikeria, is booked out until 2008.

Care NZ chief executive Tim Harding, who chairs the Drug and Alcohol Practitioners Association, said there were still about a dozen residential treatment centres, including several run by the Salvation Army's Bridge programme and others run by private trusts such as Odyssey House and at least one district health board, in Hawkes Bay.

But the association's secretary, Ian McEwan, said most of these would be shunned by senior executives.

"The publicly funded treatment services are now very much directed to look after those in the most distressed conditions. That will tend to be multiple drug users, so you are increasingly looking at young people who can't afford private care," he said.

"Their lives are just so chaotic and their needs are pretty basic.

"That's why your executive types don't match well. They really need services that come in at their level where life is being held together, if only just. They don't sit well in treatment settings with methamphetamine-using 23-year-old gang members."

Wellington counsellor Roger Green and Mr McEwan said they would have recommended Hanmer to executives when it existed.

Mr Green sends clients to the United States, but plans to open his own residential treatment centres in Auckland and Canterbury as a charitable trust.

"We'll have to charge fees but they won't be over the top," he said.

Mr Harding said the pendulum had swung too far against residential programmes in the past decade in a push to treat addicts in the community.

"I think we did need more community services, and perhaps we needed to reduce the number of residential centres," he said.

"We closed those 10 centres in 12 years without giving it real thought and making sure that we kept some of the most appropriate ones."

Air New Zealand did not comment.

* Drug and alcohol helpline, 0800 787 797


Treating addicts

New Zealand has two private treatment centres.
* Auckland's Capri Academy, which treated former MP Mark Peck for alcoholism last year, opened in 1999 and charges $4500 a week for the first two weeks and $2000 a week after that.
* Ashburn Clinic in Dunedin, founded in 1882, treats drug and alcohol addictions as well as eating disorders and other psychiatric conditions. Its fees range from $500 to $1700 a week.