ABU DHABI // Too few specialists, a shortage of treatment facilities and reluctance to admit when a family member has a problem are all hampering efforts to help drug addicts.
The single drug rehabilitation centre has only 28 beds and does not admit women, said Dr Hamad al Ghaferi, general director of the National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC) in Abu Dhabi.
"There used to be one in Dubai, which closed," he said yesterday, "and our Abu Dhabi centre admits or treats only Emirati men above the age of 18."
The NRC treats about 50 outpatients a month. There are plans to open a bigger centre that will serve women by 2014, but until then options are limited.
The attitude of families in the Middle East can be an obstacle to successful treatment, said Dr Nasser Loza, a psychiatrist and mental health specialist at Egypt's Ministry of Health.
"We Arabs tend to protect our family members. We don't tell anyone if a husband or son or uncle or sister is using drugs or are addicted. We hide it because we are afraid of the stigma and that just exacerbates the problem," he said.
Drug addicts can seek treatment at facilities such as Al Amal Psychiatric Hospital in Dubai or Sheikh Khalifa Medical City in the capital, but only for narcotic-related withdrawal symptoms, not comprehensive rehabilitation.
"We need more centres, and we really need more staff," Dr al Ghaferi said.
The NRC began trying to recruit more Emiratis to the programme two years ago but it was an uphill struggle, he said.
"We are better off than other countries in the region, but there is a lack of specialists, whether social workers or psychiatrists or psychologists or rehab clinicians," he said at the opening of the two-day Regional Forum of the International Drug Policy Consortium, the first of its kind to be held in the Gulf.
The lack of data collection and research studies that focus on the region represent another challenge to both treatment and prevention, said Prof Johannes Thrul, from the Institute of Prevention Research in Germany.
What is applicable to countries in the West, where most of the studies on addiction are conducted, often do not apply to the culturally different countries of the Middle East, he said.
To address this, the UAE has recently signed a five-year agreement with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to conduct a comprehensive analysis of drug addiction and treatment shortages, Dr al Ghaferi said.
"When the study is ready we will be able to assess the intensity of the problem," he said.
Dr Aamir Hassan, supervisor of controlled medicines at the registration and drug control department of the Ministry of Health, said the main problem the UAE faced with drug control was "prescription shopping" by patients who obtained prescription drugs from more than one pharmacy.
"We need to link clinics and pharmacies and make sure all medical records are electronically entered so patients can't end up with more than one prescription to abuse," he said.
This problem is common across the Middle East. Elie Lahoud, president and founder of the Youth for Drug Enforcement society in Lebanon, said there was a need to alert doctors and pharmacists to the harm they caused patients by turning a blind eye to the practice.
"There will always be drug abuse in every country or society, so our focus is to find ways to reduce the harm caused," he said.
Involving the family and educating healthcare professionals was one way to help, he said.
