in Val-d’Oise, a therapeutic structure fights against addiction

By Lorraine de Foucher

Posted today at 02:03

An anti-stress ball in one hand, an electronic cigarette in the other, Anaïs smokes in the rain of Montmagny (Val-d’Oise). His large black hooded sweater reveals a calligraphy tattoo on his forearm: “Maybe that’s it, a living being: tracking down moments that die.” Her brown hair is short and plaited, her Toulouse accent. At 23, Anaïs easily launches into this quantified “life story” made by former drug users, who unroll the CVs of consumers where traumas strike the substances.

Born already drugged – her mother was a drug addict, she had to be weaned in the maternity ward – then placed in a nursery, then picked up by her mother, then by Social Assistance for Children, she did not “Just look for hands to which [s]‘to hook “. At 9, she began Risperdal, then at 11 alcohol, at 13 cocaine, in summer camp, with a “Older mate”. At 16 years of age, suicide attempts, psychiatric hospitals and sexual violence arrive: “I no longer spent a day without consuming. “

Anaïs, 23, has been a resident at EDVO for six months.  She arrived with already a year of abstinence, and wanted to join the association to work on her behavior, in Montmagny (Val-d'Oise), on May 18.
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The thing she is most proud of: the length of her withdrawal, which she knows down to the day. “You weren’t mistaken about my ‘clean’ days, eh? I am eighteen months three weeks and one day ”, she claims, smiling. This longevity in abstinence, and the life that goes with it, because it is a question here of not dying, it owes it to the association Espoir du Val-d’Oise (EDVO) and to its therapeutic structure in Montmagny, in which she has lived for six months. “It’s the mif [la famille] here: there is no doctor, so we don’t have the impression of being in psychiatry, the supervisors are former junkies, we are about thirty in the same boat, we need structures like that in all the countries “, rejoices Anaïs.

Minnesota Method

While Emmanuel Macron said in April that the fight against drug trafficking was “The mother of battles”, what about this other fight, the one that the three million consumers at risk of alcohol, the 900,000 daily cannabis smokers and the 350,000 users with a “Problematic consumption” other substances may want to lead? Beyond the penal response to the circulation of narcotics, there is an equally important health issue: that of the fight against this disease of bond and emotion that is addiction.

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