Seminar Questions  »   Questions - 3) Serenity Cafe info / abstinence and harm reduction

3a) At present Serenity Cafe runs on the efforts of the volunteers, and the food and soft bar sales cover the costs of running the cafe-club events, which attract around 150 people (we reckon 100 people is about the ‘break even’ point. We bought some equipment through small grants, but we are still looking for a backer to enable us to move into permanent and full time premises. We don’t know of any others around Scotland but there is a lot of interest, so we are keen to show this is a working model that can be replicated. You can keep an eye on progress at www.serenitycafe.org.uk

3b) According to the Road to the Recovery (Scottish Government 2009) recovery is the whole journey from harm reduction to abstinence. Harm reduction is practiced throughout Scotland and for many people is an important part of their recovery journey and an important choice to have available – it is what many of us argued passionately for many years ago. But we have decided to support and celebrate abstinence in the Serenity Cafe project because it does appear to be a neglected leg of the ‘recovery journey’ in Scotland (and elsewhere in the UK) at present. In our action research, many people have told us that during the years they were on maintenance prescriptions they were often actively discouraged from thinking abstinence was an achievable goal – although they valued the period of stability prescribing gave them, ultimately they wanted to make a complete change; so perhaps professionals need to be more accepting of the idea that abstinence is possible and achievable, and be willing to discuss it with people. It is interesting that we are often being challenged by harm reduction practitioners, and policy makers, who seem to think that supporting abstinence must be oppositional to harm reduction rather than part of the same continuum – on which service users can choose for themselves where they want to start and stop.