MARK GILMAN

Mark has been the North West regional manager of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse in England since 2004 (the NTA is co-located in the Government Office for the North West in Manchester).

Listen to interview with Mark here.

Mark has a first degree in Organisation Theory and a MA in the study of Drugs, Crime and Social Deviance. He has been working with problem drug users since the 1970s.

In 1984, Mark was a research associate investigating Heroin Use and Young People in the North of England. In 1985, he joined The Lifeline Project and worked there for 14 years. He joined the Home Office as a drugs adviser in 1999.

During the Lifeline years, Mark was manager of one of the first Community Drug Teams in Trafford, Greater Manchester, worked as the North West regional drug-prevention manager and director of research. In his work with the Home Office, he worked closely with Wigan Metropolitan Borough Council on its matrix approach to social problems including drugs and alcohol. This experience was to prove invaluable when Mark joined the NTA at its inception.

In his current role, Mark worked with Drug and Alcohol Action Teams (DAATs) in Local Authorities to place the drug treatment effort firmly alongside regeneration. “We need to regenerate people as well as places. In some instances we need to ‘generate’ or ‘habilitate’ people. ‘Regeneration’ and ‘rehabilitation’ suggests that there is something there that was lost to addiction,” he explains.

“Sadly, for the most socially excluded, addiction is often rolled in not that long after puberty. For these people, recovery from addiction includes learning to be an adult citizen. Recovery means going to work and earning a living, paying bills and doing the right thing by children, family and friends. In short, recovery is a bridge to normal living. Normal living is what was going on in the outside world when the addict was stuck inside the hamster wheel of addiction and crime.”

Mark established a North West Recovery Forum and is a “committed friend of recovery”. His particular interest in recovery relates to the optimism and hope that recovery offers to those trapped in addiction within a criminal lifestyle. He believes that the most important contribution to the understanding of contemporary urban addiction is The Wire an American television drama series set and produced in Baltimore, Maryland.